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Mars DOS demo by Tim Clarke (1993)

Sean Barrett · 27.8K views · 2013-05-17 · 1:27

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Overview

A one-minute capture of Tim Clarke's 1993 'Mars' DOS demo, a roughly 5 KB program that renders a navigable terrain landscape in real time.

On Hacker News

Remembered fondly as a tiny, efficient demo that inspired graphics programmers and is a benchmark for modern terrain rendering.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2016–2025

Topics

Demoscene & retrocomputingComputer graphics & rendering
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demoscenedosvoxel terrainsize codinggraphics

What people said

Keyframe · 2016-06 · Strong recommendation

Second Reality was the best. First demo that I saw was Spaceballs' State of the art [LINK] and I vividly remember of thinking 'wtf is that, a video or what?' and then Second Reality a year later or so - [LINK] But then (I look all and every demo out there by then at the age of 13) I saw Mars demo [VIDEO] which hooked me forever on the path of graphics programming.

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reconnecting · 2025-07 · Recommendation

It's amazing what people achieved with the resources of the '80s, creating fairly enjoyable visuals using extremely limited technology. Another example from the early '90s is MARS.COM (1) by Tim Clarke (1993). Just 6 kilobytes and 30+ fps on a 12MHZ 286 (2). 1. [VIDEO] 2. [LINK]

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velosol · 2023-07 · Reference

Thinking about demos brought me right back to probably one of the first things I downloaded, the 'controllable' Mars demo [1,2]. I zoomed around that landscape in the way a child can pour hours into what anyone older would view as painfully repetitive. Based on the YT comments it's been done at shadertoy too: [LINK] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Sean Barrett, played through YouTube.

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