There seems to be a major misconception now-a-days that it is imposable to create a good game, unless it has a large file size.
I know that there are hundreds of old-school gamesthat are under 1 MB in size ( most of the largest NES game were under 500 KB ), but how many good games can you think of that have been made in the last 5 years, and are under 10 MB in size?

Right off the top of my head I can think of William And Sly 2, but I know there are many more.

Can you list more ?

Actually, the largest licensed NES game was 6mbit, or 768KB (Kirby's dreamland), there was another game at 5mb (640KB), and many at 4mb (512KB). On the SNES, two games weighed in at 48mb, or 6 MB, (JRPGs Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean). The N64's largest cartridges were 512mb, or 64MB, (Resident Evil 2 and Conker's Bad Fur Day).

In terms of cartridges you were always constrained by what was economical, you were told by the suits what size your ROM would be and you filled every bit of it. Then there were CDs, which were effectively infinite in size when they first came out. On the PC side, there was really never any hard constraint. The only one's concerned with size these days are people who have to deal with the arbitrary limits set by the various marketplaces (XBox Live Arcade or Indie Games, App Store, Google Play, PSN, etc), but all those are well north or 10MB.

Its worth mentioning that it wasn't precisely the size of the experience that kept those old school games small -- it was more the fidelity of the experience: Smaller graphics, less colors, and fewer frames of animation make for a rather effective lossy compression scheme. Sound was effectively stored as a series of commands (not unlike midi), or samples (not unlike MOD) in later years -- much more efficient than full WAV audio tracks, or even MP3s.

If you remade even Super Mario Bros. 1 today to meet contemporary standards for quality 2D graphics and audio, it'd probably end up being 3 orders of magnitude larger in terms of raw assets, and general-purpose compression might win back an order of magnitude or so -- so the final product might end up being 2 orders of magnitude larger: about 32mb, or 4MB.

In short, there's certainly a lot you can do with 10MB I agree, but in the light of a "modern" Super Mario Bros. being nearly half of that without specialized compression, it's no wonder so few games weigh in at under 10MB today.

In 2009, Notch (of Minecraft fame) made a little game inspired by Left 4 Dead called L4kD.
As the title suggests it's under 4kb.

The other concern of size is how fast it takes to download (especially for demos), even if there is no marketplace limit. 500 MB downloads quickly enough for a full game, but your demo should download ever faster. Patches and updates should download very fast too - users don't want a huge delay anytime they start your game so it can update.

Braid is 155 MB - it was released 4 years ago, as a downloadable-only title. For a commercial-quality game, unless you do procedural generation, you can't get too much better. As Ravyne mentioned, it's the quality of the content that weighs so much. Yes, you can make great games without high quality art - but the public wants high quality art, and complains (often irrationally) if your game looks poorly.

Some stats about my own WIP to-be-commercial 2D RPG:
- Release .exe and .dlls: 40.4 MB ([size=2]Won't get much larger)
- 2D tileart: 27.5 MB ([size=2]And not anywhere near finished - will get larger)
- Game world: 0 MB ([size=2]Haven't created a single in-game area yet - still working on the editor)

The final result of my game, when I complete it, and after optimizing, will probably be around 150 MB. I'd like to fit it on a CD, but that just ain't possible it looks like.

This reminded me of Java 4K.

Okay, the graphics are simple... but as the slogan says "Minimum Games, Maximum Fun".
Even if they don't fit a commerciral standard, I like this contest as a personal challenge. A challenge to achieve fun things at the simplistic level!

The final result of my game, when I complete it, and after optimizing, will probably be around 150 MB. I'd like to fit it on a CD, but that just ain't possible it looks like.

CD-ROM's are 700MB.. am I missing something? Or do you mean those smaller ones like those driver disks that get shipped with hardware?

*smacks forehead*
Yes, that's right. My plan (a year ago) was to fit it on a tiny 52MB "business-card" style disc, just for style.
But I'll have to put it on a regular CD, which, you're right, are 700MB. I had forgotten the exact details of what my intent was, and got confused.

Every single game I plan on making.

I just uploaded one a couple of days ago to the apple app store 6.4 mb it was
the reason games are so big today is media eg in the old days u have sprites of 16x16 or 32x32 pixels in 8 bit color or less aka less than 1 kb, imagine that today having the main character come in at under 1kb

*smacks forehead*
Yes, that's right. My plan (a year ago) was to fit it on a tiny 52MB "business-card" style disc, just for style.
But I'll have to put it on a regular CD, which, you're right, are 700MB. I had forgotten the exact details of what my intent was, and got confused.

there are business-card dvds. they have 350mb. i'm curious if there are business-card blurays