How Pokémon Fit on a Gameboy - Compression Explained

🎮 How Pokémon Red and Blue Squeezed into Just 1 Megabyte 🕹️

So I picked up Pokémon Red and became weirdly obsessed with how they shoved an entire game into less memory than a single meme today. As a computer science student, I thought, "Hey, this is probably something I should learn about to increase my chances of not being homeless," so here we are! Enjoy, because if any of this ends up making any sense, it'll be the first time in my life something like that happens.

I broke down compression techniques Game Freak used, diving into Run Length Encoding, bitplane magic, and other coding tricks that basically turned a Game Boy into a pocket-sized miracle machine.

More material on topics i went over shortly in this video:
RLE:
https://www.fastpix.io/blog/what-is-r...
Sprite Compression:
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=4...
   • Pokémon Sprite Decompression Explained  
Tile Graphics and More:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/...


Sources to everything i said in this video: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I...

#pokemon #retrogaming