The 90’s Demoscene subculture was famous for building incredible visual demos in astoundingly small executables sizes. Many demo scene gatherings had maximum size requirements – often in just a few hundred, or even a few DOZEN, kilobytes. Figuring out how to get the most amazing tech in the smallest size was one of the great innovation points for these contests.

Once developers had exhausted their technical chops on generating amazing art with miniscule code (using all the tricks in the book they could think of), they quickly found that hand-tuned compression became far too tedious and brittle. So, they started building tools to do this compression for them.

I wrote about a more modern take on this where MattKC tried to fit an entire game into a QR code. Part of his adventure was compressing the executable using an old demoscene tool called Crinkler.

There were others, one of which was called lekktor which was used first on their .kkrieger demo. The story behind the development is a fun read as is an interview he did in 2005.

Apparently it used a form of code coverage as part of the analysis which ran while you ran the application. This had the dubious effect of allowing people to use the down arrow down on menus but not the up arrow – because nobody ever pressed the up arrow when training the compressor.

Links:

• .kkrieger
• Metaprogramming for madmen | The ryg blog (wordpress.com)
• Interview: Frugal Fragging with.kkrieger (gamedeveloper.com)