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I don’t know if this is the right subreddit for this but does anyone know how many lines of code are in super Mario 64? I’ve been wondering for a while now

r/codingbootcamp

u/michaelnovati replied ·
It's really hard to answer this question. The code would be compiled down into machine code to fit onto a cartridge. Tangent: something I learned about NES and SNES cartridges is that they actually add ADDITIONAL HARDWARE that can vary by cartridge and this is also why some games are more expensive than others. N64 I don't think/know if this was as common. But anyways, the short answer is it doesn't really matter. The source code could be long or short to be more readable or easier to iterate quickly on the game. As long as it compiled down to something that worked on a cartridge and had high performance on the N64 hardware. Additionally, games have lots of sprites and images, which take up room and aren't really a "line of code". So you probably need a few metrics to try to understand the size of the codebase.