The 1987 game "The Last Ninja" was 40 kilobytes

Apparently this person is referring to the available ram on a Commodore 64. The media (data) on disk or tape was much more than that.

I was looking at a production service we run that was using a few GBs of memory. When I add up all the actual data needed in a naive compact representation I end up with a few MBs. So much waste. That's before thinking of clever ways to compress, or de-duplicate or rearrange that data.

Back in the day getting the 16KB expansion pack for my 1KB RAM ZX81 was a big deal. And I also wrote code for PIC microcontrollers that have 768 bytes of program memory [and 25 bytes of RAM]. It's just so easy to not think about efficiency today, you write one line of code in a high level language and you blow away more bytes than these platforms had without doing anything useful.

I grew up with and absolutely adore The Last Ninja series. I'm not going to comment on the size thing because it's so trite.

Instead - here's [0] Ben Daglish (on flute) performing "Wastelands" together with the Norwegian C64/Amiga tribute band FastLoaders. He unfortunately passed away in 2018, just 52 years old.

If that tickled your fancy, here's [1] a full concert with them where they perform all songs from The Last Ninja.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovFgdcapUYI [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTZ1O1LJg-k

I remember this game, the way it drew itself on each screen, the nice graphics. Growing up with games on Atari, Commodore, Amstrad, and Spectrum, was a lot of fun.

By comparison, COD Modern Warfare 3 is 6,000,000 times larger at 240GB. Imagine telling that to someone in 1987.

That short video of the game on twitter is 11.5MB, or about 300x larger than the game itself.

It's kind of amazing how much of those old games was actual logic instead of data.

Feels like they were closer to programs, while modern games are closer to datasets.

Masterpieces like these are a perfect demonstration that performance relies not only on fast processors, but on understanding how your data and code compete for resources. Truly admirable. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

Wow that search/interact mechanic is obnoxious, you can see the player fumbling it every time, despite knowing exactly where the item is they’re trying to collect.

A game which was actually 40 kilobytes: Super Mario Bros. It had 32 side-scrolling levels.

The same size as Super Mario Bros. (NES, 1985)

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