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
You know all those bushes and clouds you see in the game while you’re playing it?
They only need ONE bush and ONE cloud in the game’s code, and they can re-use the same asset repeatedly to generate the frame on screen. Repeat for all the frames that need to be drawn.
But if you take a screenshot, that image will record ALL the bushes and clouds that happen to be on screen at the time separately, because it’s basically a grid of pixels as tall and as wide as the whole screen.
Now, are you ready to *really* blow your mind? The bush and the cloud are actually [the same asset](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/8ij644/the_bushes_and_clouds_in_super_mario_bros_are_the/), just painted different colours at render time.
Repeat such tricks and a few others, and that’s how you fit a whole game in 32 KB.
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