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Elevated by RGBA and TBC

BUTTONTANG · 973.7K views · 2009-04-12 · 3:36

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Overview

Elevated is a 4 kilobyte PC demo by RGBA and TBC from Breakpoint 2009. It fly-throughs a realistic procedurally generated landscape with synthesized music and post-processing, all from a tiny executable.

On Hacker News

HN repeatedly holds it up as the benchmark for what procedural generation and size-coding can achieve in 4K.

Recommended by 7 HN people across 7 months · HN mentions 2009–2025

Topics

Demoscene & retrocomputingCreative coding & generative artComputer graphics & rendering
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demosceneprocedural generation4k introsize codingterrain

What people said

TacticalCoder · 2014-02 · Strong recommendation

In a different style, the "Elevated" demo, coded in 4K (you'll have a hard time believing it if you haven't seen it yet): [VIDEO]

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karteum · 2025-04 · Recommendation

It's 12 years old now, but I am still extremely impressed by this 64k intro [LINK] and also by this 4k intro [VIDEO] :) And overall this website is extremely interesting with tutorials and code and great explanations [LINK]

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dwrodri · 2020-05 · Recommendation

I know that a huge part of the demoscene culture is keeping your trade secrets close, but I'd love to see a YouTube playlist where authors or people with significant graphics experience do in-depth teardowns. Those of us like myself who only take a passing interest from afar are still blown away by how amazing results of demos like "elevated" from 2009 [1]. I've heard Iñigo Quílez, but I am curious if there are people interested in doing teardowns of winners moreso than elementary concepts (although of course the latter is much more applciable outside of the demo scene). 1= [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by BUTTONTANG, 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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