With some basic Googling It looks like that the max size was around 512 KB. How is this even possible to fit games of this size onto such little memory? What is this magic?
In: Technology
Short version: *insanely* talented coders doing everything they could to maximize space. I’m gonna blow your mind right now. Take a look at the [intro to SMB1.](https://cdn02.nintendo-europe.com/media/images/10_share_images/games_15/virtual_console_nintendo_3ds_7/SI_3DSVC_SuperMarioBros.jpg) We’ll ignore for a moment the fact that that screenshot takes up more memory than the entire game did.
Anyway, take a real hard look at it. Check out everything – the bricks, Mario, the Goomba, the hill, the clouds, the bushes… the clouds, the bushes… *the clouds, the bushes*…
Yeah. They’re the same icon, just with a new color palette swapped in. All sorts of little tricks like that in old-school programming.
And it’s not totally dead either! There’s still a (mostly European) subculture devoted to slick programming, called the [Demoscene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene). I’m gonna date myself here, but when I was a College Freshman I was introduced to a Demo called “[The Product](http://theproduct.de/)” – it’s a several minute long music video, all 3d generated graphics, made in under **64Kb**. I just downloaded it and checked – still runs on my fully updated Windows 10 machine, but I know for a while there it wasn’t playing nice with new computers so YMMV.
So coders are still out there that are capable of doing, frankly, ridiculous shit like that (even though that’s nearly 20 years old at this point, it’s still ongoing) — just they don’t *have* to anymore because it’s assumed most people will have reasonable stats on their computer. If everyone has 16 gigs of ram, who cares if you lose a couple kilobytes? Guys who are programming for efficiency, that’s who.
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