Sure, who’d want to erase a single note of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony? But, by the same mistaken token, who’d want to sit through a production of Hamlet in which every word in the text was performed? Who’d be able to sit through such a performance?

Still, "economy of means" has to be a starting point when you’re looking at a 20-year-old video game that hasn’t been available legally for 15 years, and that unknown thousands of people are still avidly playing from pirated versions… and whose total original code occupied a mere 36,000 bytes. Yep. A complete, really good game, with animation, music, and sound effects in 36K: The game called "M.U.L.E."

The graphics are primitive, the animations jerky, the colors minimal (16 in number), the music is midi-esque. And yet M.U.L.E. lives. Not just lives: it thrives.