system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How/why do old games like Ocarina of Time, a seemingly massive game at the time, manage to only take up 32mb of space, while a simple time waster like candy crush saga takes up 43mb?

Subsequently, how did we fit entire operating systems like Windows 95/98 on hard drives less than 1gb? Did software engineers just find better ways to utilize space when there was less to be had? Could modern software take up less space if engineers tried?

Edit: great explanations everybody! General consensus is art = space. It was interesting to find out that most of the music and video was rendered on the fly by the console while the cartridge only stored instructions.  I didn't consider modern operating systems have to emulate all their predecessors and control multiple hardware profiles... Very memory intensive. Also, props to the folks who gave examples of crazy shit compressed into <1mb files. Reminds me of all those old flash games we used to be able to stack into floppy disks. (penguin bowling anybody?) thanks again!
gpt
A large chunk of a game's size comes from things like textures and audio files. Older games had very small, simple textures if they used them at all. In contrast, newer games tend to use high-resolution images that take dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of megabytes just by themselves. Likewise, audio in old games was pretty simple. Older systems synthesized sounds, allowing the game to just supply some basic instructions to control them. Now, audio is typically recorded and stored with the game, making the overall size larger.