hackertube.io

Can you fit a whole game into a QR code?

MattKC · demo · Watch on YouTube

Demoscene & retrocomputingSoftware performance & optimizationSecurity & hacking

What it is

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.

Why Hacker News recommends it

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

  • 2 people recommended it
  • 2 different months
  • 1 strong recommendations
  • first 2020, last 2025

What HN commenters said

  1. “I admire this type of content where the creator take some concepts we [all] use and understand”

    Creative combination of familiar concepts into something new

    redbell, 2022-07 · Strong recommendation · in “Embedding an EXE inside a .REG file with automatic execution”

  2. “Quite an interesting watch.”

    Snake game fitting inside a QR code

    fath0m, 2020-11 · Recommendation · in “Flappy Bird in 228 bytes”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: qr code, x86 assembly, snake, size coding, zbar

Also recommended by the same people