That’s nothing! The original Super Mario Bros was 40k! What allows these old games to be super small is that they’re 8-bit and use sprite, tiles, and tile maps

That’s nothing! The original Super Mario Bros was 40k! What allows these old games to be super small is that they’re 8-bit and use sprite, tiles, and tile maps; and palettes for everything. Almost everything was done in hardware so you didn’t need to implement a renderer in software, you just poked bytes in various places and stuff happened. Even the loading data was handled by DMA.