Video Games Could Be Tiny. Why Aren’t They?

Summary

The video examines how the 2004 game .kkrieger fit a complete 3D shooter into about 97 KB, and why modern games generally don’t use the same approach to minimize file sizes.

How the game kept its file size small

• Compression has limits. Digital audio is stored as sampled and quantized data, and game audio can consume substantial space. Compression must also account for practical needs, such as seamless music loops and sound effects that play without delay. Games may reduce audio quality or reuse sounds with small variations, but audio can still take up many gigabytes.
• .kkrieger generated content instead of storing it. Its custom synthesizer creates music and sound effects from instructions, while the game constructs meshes from basic 3D shapes and operations. Text and some textures use Windows’ text-rendering system. Most textures are generated at launch from patterns, noise, color gradients, and other procedural techniques.
• The content was designed, not randomly generated. Assets follow predetermined instructions, giving the developers artistic control. Their custom node-based tool, .werkkzeug, let them build and inspect the steps used to create those assets.
• The tiny file required intensive optimization. The developers compressed the executable, removed or replaced code, and used a custom preprocessing tool to make the code compress better. Late reductions helped bring the game under the competition’s 96-kibibyte limit. Some last-minute changes also introduced bugs, including a missing condition for taking damage from enemy projectiles.

Trade-offs and broader use

Generating content takes time and computing resources. The video reports a roughly 10-second startup on the narrator’s PC and about 300 MB of memory use after launch. Generating content during play can burden the CPU, while loading assets can cause stutters. Building a game this way also requires specialized tools and can slow development.

Procedural techniques are already common in game development. They are used for textures, models, sounds, visual effects, and world generation, but mainly to speed up production or add variety—not necessarily to shrink installed game sizes. The video also notes that a later experiment using PAQ-style compression reduced .kkrieger to about 87 KB.

Video content and sources

This is a technology explainer, not a game review or tutorial. It demonstrates how .kkrieger’s audio, meshes, and textures were made, including a walkthrough of generating a wooden floor texture. A sponsor segment promotes The Book, an illustrated guide to inventions and discoveries.

The main speaker is the narrator from Worlds In Motion. The video also draws on the developers of .kkrieger and .werkkzeug, who are not individually named in the subtitles, and includes sponsor Hungry Minds, promoting The Book.