Historically, who has been more impressive at pushing Nintendo hardware, Nintendo themselves or third parties?

[Vodacixi]

haxxiy said:

Shikamo said:

Some peoples will not agree with me, but Pokemon Silver & Gold on GBC. They managed to put johto and Kanto in a single gbc card (Kanto is empty af, but still a entire region).

IIRC that was just because of the increased cartridge size. If anything, their compression algorithm for Gold & Silver was worse than the one used in Red & Blue, as the people working on decompiling them found out.

I don't know much about game sizes and coding, but Gold and Silver have better visuals, 100 more Pokémon, 100 more moves, more items, quite a bit more beefy sprites, a 24/7 real-time system with a crap ton of events and variables, twice as many music tracks... and much more. That alone should at least take quite a chunk from the extra MB Gold and Silver had over Red and Blue. But then they just went and add  Kanto. I don't think fitting all of that with just twice the memory was an easy feat.