– How is it that the first Mario Bros. game was about 32kb, but a JPEG of the game is over 300kbs in 2023?

Question

I’ve seen the meme/info-graphic that the original file for Mario Bros. was approx. 32kb, but a picture file would be 10x more.

I’ve googled it and looked, but it seems to have some nebulous answers. Could someone please ELI5?

In: 26

Answer 1

If you had an image file of the same resolution of the original game it would be of a similar size. Jpeg isn’t the format you’d want to use, the overhead is greater than the pixel days (around 50000 total pixels, with just a couple of bits per pixel for color)
The default for current images would be a minimum of 8 bits per pixel per color (RGB)
50000 pixels at 8bit color depth would be 1.2Mb (150kB)