– 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

Back in the day, memory was extremely expensive. Programmers actually had to conserve memory by utilizing tricks of the trade to fit everything into a small package.

These days, memory is cheap, so programmers are allowed to freely utilize more memory resources (and even to be sloppy, in this old programmer’s opinion) , and not have to conserve as much.