The bang per kilobyte

[Sumea]

So, after making a huge folder of around 200 gigabytes and copying smaller slices of it on many of my devices, I began to think how efficiently old ROM files deliver fun, full, and sometimes even long games comparing to "current" standard.
Game file sizes have ballooned in more and more silly ways, giving me a thought of "what could you do with a modern COD installation?" that last I checked, is 150GiB, or more.
Into this, you can store fifteen or more OK PS3 games: average is around 10GiB and few specific examples are Resident Evil 5 on PS3 needing 8GiB. Yakuza 5 is 22GiB, Uncharted 3 was quite huge at ~40-50GiB. PSN downloadable games range on other hand from few hundred MiB to 1-2 GiB.
You can fit likely two or three dozen OK PS2 games into that 150GiB of a CoD installation. Given the average size of PS2 titles being around 3GiB. Again, some smaller, some many larger, some are on a Dual Layer DVD9 like Yakuza 2, or on two discs.
As for PS1, it goes from one to other side of the room, percentage wise thinking, the most. Many PS1 games take only ~50MiB of space, and others take four CD's, more or less 4x600MiB. PS1 could be likely first real data explosion for gaming kinda like game sizes exploding more than increasing linearly from end of PS3 days to today. If discounting possibility for CHD compression, you could have 100 PS1 games including few multi-disc ones take up around 60~80GiB in my quick and rough estimation.
N64 games of course are limited by the upper limits of ROM chips to use in 90's but this to me just makes games like Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, not to talk about the RE2 port, more amazing. If taking my personal collection as example, you can fit 50 notorious N64 games in single CD-R, cheating with ZIP/7z packaging a little.
SNES and Mega Drive can have fantastic complex beautiful games that take 512-6144KiB of space.
And NES, you can have the whole library even without cheating with ZIP or 7z compression many many times over stored withing the 150GiB. Almost thousand games that take less than 1GiB of space.


So, retro gaming, which is why I am not making this strictly an emulation thread, even if it is easily more emulation adjacent, but retro gaming especially through lens of today is wild for how little space a games like Chrono Trigger or Ocarina of Time take. This also made me realize how small Nintendo games historically have been, even during GameCube, Wii and Wii U era.

And of course, the thread title; you can talk about your favorite "Bang per kilobyte" games like Super Mario Bros that is everyone's obvious observation.
If you have a 150GiB allocation of space for games you take to a deserted island with electricity, what would you take with you and how much space would even be left over?
What modern game sizes seem absolutely ridiculous when using older games as comparison?
Just in general favorite games with tiny footprints?

 

[Spike's iconSpike]

Most of the size % comes from the graphics.
But most of the fun % comes from the gameplay.
A game that looks like a movie, something like Unreal Engine 5...I'd be impressed. But entertained?

 

[LittenRages]

Most of the size % comes from the graphics.
But most of the fun % comes from the gameplay.
A game that looks like a movie, something like Unreal Engine 5...I'd be impressed. But entertained?

Agree here. But if its got good graphics AND gameplay? Then man it's a really good game.

 

[goregoregoregoregoregore]

It's incredible what people can do with modifying Quake engine. QuakeSpasm is so complete and light while being so accessible, i understand people who prefer it over the ID official remake, even if i get weirded out playing anything outside of JoeQuake which is so absurdly light, you can download the entire game + demos + mission packs + different custom configs in single zip file of 91mb at speed demos archive.
Also Dwarf Fortress. It's so massive and with tons and tons of content, to the point that creating a new world might take a hour depending on your specs and it's so light, it's like 1GB on steam

 

[Sumea]

Most of the size % comes from the graphics.
But most of the fun % comes from the gameplay.
A game that looks like a movie, something like Unreal Engine 5...I'd be impressed. But entertained?

This. Of Course RetroAhoy said it accurately in one of his videos about evolution of video game graphics: "They say graphics aren't important, but every game I've played had 'em"
There is limits to how fun a text adventure or ASCII game like original rogue/nethack can be, which would be using the PC's built in graphics set (font in rom) essentially.
But there are ways to make visually appealing games on just about every generation without going beyond infinity of dumb with it. These days, games emulating the look of PS1 games are popular and with that, they also take far less space than other modern indie games.
Graphics and sound are still important aspects to just about every fun video game, but being smart about them is an art lost to past.

 

[Spike's iconSpike]

Some Early 3D games are hard to look at and I can see how a graphics overhaul could make them more enjoyable.
But for pixel arty 2D games, those 1:1 remakes where the movement and physics remain the same except the graphics are HD (like a skin)...are kind of pointless? I tend to prefer the original game aesthetics even if outdated by today's standard.

That "new" Wonder Boy game did it very well, on the fly switch both modern and retro styles:

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

A lot of games are artificially inflated to discourage piracy -- I think Wolfenstein (2009) had you download dozens of gigabytes you weren't even gonna use to make it hard to torrent.

There was a great quote plastered all-over Abandonware sites in the past that said: "There was a time when the lack of power was made up for with imagination".

 

[DanVzare]

I've got over 15,000 games on a 64gb microsd card. That's several consoles worth of complete romsets.
So yeah, it's safe to say that in terms of size, old games sure did give you a lot of bang for your buck.

I mean, when the latest Call of Duty takes up about as much space as every single PS1 game combined (assuming all of the PS1 games are properly compressed), then yeah... it's easy to see that game size has ballooned.

But it all depends on the game really. Indie games as an example, usually take next to no space.

 

[Sumea]

I've got over 15,000 games on a 64gb microsd card. That's several consoles worth of complete romsets.
So yeah, it's safe to say that in terms of size, old games sure did give you a lot of bang for your buck.

I mean, when the latest Call of Duty takes up about as much space as every single PS1 game combined (assuming all of the PS1 games are properly compressed), then yeah... it's easy to see that game size has ballooned.

But it all depends on the game really. Indie games as an example, usually take next to no space.

Yeah, I initially wrote my PS1 example with my CHD sized as example that makes the example of about 100 games take less than 35GiB, when talking about compressed all of these take even less space, and the emulators plus their system files are not exactly humongous either if you would account for them.

 

[jakecr]

To me any 16-bit or 32-bit era game is gonna offer way more bang/fun for your kilobyte than any modern game (the amount of 8-bit games that I enjoy is limited though but those too especially if we're talking about hours of fun per byte here).

A lot of games are artificially inflated to discourage piracy -- I think Wolfenstein (2009) had you download dozens of gigabytes you weren't even gonna use to make it hard to torrent.

I guess it kinda works, most people are not going to keep a 200+GB game around after they're done with it, especially just the installation files. And for something that big I rather just buy it so I can have access to it and delete it or download it whenever I want without having to depend on future dead torrents/links.

It's like Gabe Newell said piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem, if you make it more convenient than piracy a lot of people are going to prefer the legal way.

Instead of forcing people to not pirate with lawsuits and threats, you provide a good service and let people choose. That's how things should always work imo.

 

[GardeniaSky]

I hate sounding like an old lady but older games slap compared to new ones. Tech limitations forced developers to get creative in packing as much content as possible into small spaces. Nowadays, companies have massive space to work with and games just end up feeling empty.

It's probably just nostalgia glasses but idk.

I would absolutely take a ton of GB and GBA era games. Zelda, Fire Emblem, Metroid.

Like, I love Baldur's Gate 3, but when I want to play it, I have to purposefully allocate special room just for it. Damn thing is massive.

 

[Egg (McMuffin) Man]

I just set up a USB stick as a back up a few days ago. It's 128GB, so a bit under your 150GB challenge. On that single USB stick I was able to fit every cartridge based game ever made for every console and handheld up to GBA, as well as a complete collection of scans for Nintendo Power and GameFan, and a number of scans for Famitsu and other magazines. There is still quite a bit of space left on the drive which I will probably fill with more magazine scans...

But for the purpose of this let's limit it to just games. The games one take up 41.6GB of space, that leaves me with just under 110GB left to work with for your challenge. I would pick a variety of my favorite games from Sega Saturn, PCE CD, PSX, Dreamcast, or Gamecube to fill in the rest of the space.