The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes

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.

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.

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.

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

I'm not sure this is particularly telling. You can write a tiny program that generates a 4K image, and the image could be 1000x larger.

Or, if I write a short description "A couple walks hand-in-hand through a park at sunset. The wind rustles the orange leaves.", I don't think it would be surprising to anyone that an image or video of this would be relatively huge.