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Can you fit a whole game into a QR code?

MattKC · 9M views · 2020-07-31 · 20:03

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Overview

MattKC fits a playable Snake game into a QR code by writing tiny x86 machine code and patching the ZBar scanner so it can run the decoded data.

On Hacker News

HN admires it as a creative hack and cites it as the inspiration for later tiny-game and QR-code projects.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2020–2025

Topics

Demoscene & retrocomputingSoftware performance & optimizationSecurity & hacking
Search by tags
qr codex86 assemblysnakesize codingzbar

What people said

redbell · 2022-07 · Strong recommendation

I admire this type of content where the creator take some concepts we [all] use and understand then combine them in a specific, but a new way, add some tweaks to get some never-seen results. Here is another experience that, as a Windows developer, blows my mind for a while. [VIDEO]

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fath0m · 2020-11 · Recommendation

Using all the browser functionality feels like cheating. There is a good YouTube video, where a person made a snake game that fits inside a QR Code (albeit a larger version that we're used to, which can hold up to 2953 bytes). You can check it out here: [VIDEO] Quite an interesting watch.

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redbell · 2025-04 · Reference

Really cool project! TIL about 'data:' URLs—while I was familiar with the 'data:' URI scheme and had used it before, I didn’t realize it could be used as a full URL. Funny enough, I had been thinking about building something similar that fits entirely within a QR code, but I held off because I mistakenly thought it would require an HTTP(s) link. I was heavily inspired by this work: Can you fit a whole game into a QR code?( [VIDEO] )

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Sources

Video by MattKC, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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