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Elevated by RGBA and TBC

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7 HN users recommended this demo7 months2009–2025 score 7.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN repeatedly holds it up as the benchmark for what procedural generation and size-coding can achieve in 4K.

Elevated is a 4 kilobyte PC demo by RGBA and TBC from Breakpoint 2009. It fly-throughs a realistic procedurally generated landscape with synthesized music and post-processing, all from a tiny executable.

“you'll have a hard time believing it if you haven't seen it yet” (HN, 2014)

1 strong recommendations · 6 recommendations · 5 citations · Demos

12 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@barrettcolin Apr 2009 Recommends
on HN thread Awesome Procedural Terrain Generation
Check out 'Elevated' - winner of the 4k PC demo category at Breakpoint 2009. It's a fly-through of a realistic looking procedurally generated terrain model with music and some fancy post processing effects all squeezed into a <4096 bytes executable. Even my moderately high-end PC can't run it (I suspect because it shoves an overwhelmingly huge triangle mesh at the GPU) but there's a video here: [this video]
Fly-through of procedural terrain with music in a 4KB executable
@z303 May 2010 Recommends
on HN thread The Demoscene -- an Overview
Two more by Farbrausch the.popular.demo [link] and Candytron (64K) [link] For some newer releases blunderbuss by Fairlight [link] is very different is style but still very cool and two post about the particle system behind the demo [link] [link] Elevated by Rgba & TBC [this video] is a great example of what people can do in 4K, and they even have a presentation about the technical details [link] and State of the Art by Spaceballs [link] is a highpoint of the amiga scene (edited to add, which I should have clicked on the link to see it had already been embedded)
Great example of what can be done in 4K
@vmind May 2012 Recommends
on HN thread Infinite complexity in 4096 bytes
Cool, but I think my favourite 4k demo is still Elevated, which is much less obviously procedural. ( [this video] )
Commenter's favourite 4k demo, not obviously procedural
@userbinator Jul 2016 Recommends
on HN thread Show HN: A simple infinite world in WebGL
Indeed, keep going, and you may reach this level of awesome: [this video] (Quite realistic terrain generated by a 4 kilobyte binary, along with music . Source code and its discussion here: [link] )
Level of awesome to aim for in procedural terrain
@dwrodri May 2020 Recommends
on HN thread The Vanishing Of Ashlar: 4kb demo using GPU for sound and pathtracing
I know that a huge part of the demoscene culture is keeping your trade secrets close, but I'd love to see a YouTube playlist where authors or people with significant graphics experience do in-depth teardowns. Those of us like myself who only take a passing interest from afar are still blown away by how amazing results of demos like "elevated" from 2009 [1]. I've heard Iñigo Quílez, but I am curious if there are people interested in doing teardowns of winners moreso than elementary concepts (although of course the latter is much more applciable outside of the demo scene). 1= [this video]
Amazing 2009 demo results; commenter wishes for in-depth teardowns
@karteum Apr 2025 Recommends
on HN thread The demoscene as a UNESCO heritage in Sweden
It's 12 years old now, but I am still extremely impressed by this 64k intro [link] and also by this 4k intro [this video] :) And overall this website is extremely interesting with tutorials and code and great explanations [link]
Still-impressive 4k intro

Citations, criticism and jokes

@thristian Jan 2010 Cites it
on HN thread "Elevated": Landscape generation and music synthesis in 4KB
For the impatient or people without sufficient hardware, a YouTube recording is here: [this video] One of the guys who created this little gem gave a presentation about the technology behind it; slides are here: [link]
Video recording of the 4K demo for those without hardware
@slackito Dec 2010 Cites it
on HN thread Procedural Building Generation in Unreal Engine 3
> For doing data compression has anyone ever heard about using these techniques to generate other things besides 3D game levels? These techniques are routinely used in the demoscene for making 4Kb/64Kb intros. In this kind of intros almost everything is generated procedurally, not only meshes, but also textures and sound. If you are interested you can watch one of these examples: - Elevated (4K intro) Binary: [link] Youtube video: [this video] - .kkrieger (96K game) Binary: [link] Gameplay video: [link]
Example of a 4K intro generating meshes, textures and sound procedurally
@klodolph Sep 2012 Cites it
on HN thread Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than (2011)
> The article's tone implies that these were the 'good old days' when compilers were small and fast. That's reading a lot into two short paragraphs. Tone doesn't come across well in text, and the shorter the text is, the harder it is to figure out tone. I don't hear nostalgia for the 'good old days' in the article, what I hear is, "Wow! What a feat of engineering to fit an IDE and compiler into 40k!" We get the same kick out of watching demo competitions. Have you seen the "Elevated" demo? Including the music, sound effects, textures, everything, it's only 4k... [this video]
Shows a whole demo with music and textures in only 4k

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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