A floppy disk’s worth of storage. A game that has to justify every byte. Total prize pool: ₩1,140,000.
The 1.44MB Game Development Contest is accepting submissions through September 4, 2026. Organized by game culture project group 2P GAME ARCADE in partnership with Minimap, indiegame.com, Chungkang College of Cultural Industries, and Myongji College, the contest asks a simple and specifically demanding question: what can you build in the storage space of a single 3.5-inch floppy disk?
indiegame.com is an official sponsoring partner for this event.
The 1.44MB limit is not a soft suggestion. The complete distribution package — executable, all game engine and library files, assets, audio, everything required to run the game as a standalone program — must fit within 1.44MB total. No internet connection, no server calls, no external runtime dependencies. HTML and web-based games are excluded because they rely on browser environments not included in the file size. The game must actually run from those 1.44MB in isolation.
What’s unrestricted: programming language (C++, HSP, or anything else), development tools, including custom-built engines, team size, and creative direction. The constraint is the package size. How you get there is entirely your problem to solve.
Why This Constraint Is Interesting
The 1.44MB limit is a constraint that rewrites the development question at a fundamental level. Contemporary game development asks, “What should be in this game?” The 1.44MB constraint asks, “What is the minimum necessary for this game to be itself?” These are different questions with different answers, and the second question is pedagogically more demanding than the first.
2P GAME ARCADE’s organizer stated this directly: “We want this to be an opportunity to reconsider what the core fun of a game is, rather than simply achieving 1.44MB by reducing graphics and sound.” Reducing graphics and audio is the obvious approach; it’s also the approach that misses the point. The developers who produce interesting entries will be the ones who identify what their game’s essential experience is and build only that, rather than building a conventional game and compressing it until it fits.
The 1980s and 1990s developers who worked within these actual hardware constraints didn’t have the option of starting with more and cutting back. They knew from the beginning that the disk held 1.44MB and that every byte was a decision. Procedural generation, algorithmic content, careful data encoding, mathematical representation of content rather than pre-rendered assets — these were genuine technical innovations driven by genuine scarcity. The contest recreates the conditions that made those innovations necessary.
The Historical Reference Point
The organizers specifically cite the 1997 HiTEL (Korean PC communication network) Game Development Club’s 100KB Game Contest as the direct predecessor this event is reviving. That contest — held on a dial-up communication network, in an era before “indie games” was a recognized category, before game jam culture existed as a named phenomenon — produced games that demonstrated what Korean developers could accomplish within extreme constraints.
The 1.44MB contest is more than twice that generous. It’s also operating in a world where game installation files routinely run to dozens or hundreds of gigabytes. The relative constraint is, if anything, more extreme than the original — a 1.44MB game in 2026 is a more radical departure from contemporary expectations than a 100KB game was in 1997.
Contest Details
Prize pool: ₩1,140,000 total. Grand Prize ₩720,000, Gold Award ₩280,000, Silver Award ₩140,000.
Submission deadline: September 4, 2026.
Eligibility: Open to individuals and teams. Professional indie developers, students, and anyone else. All assets must be original work or properly licensed; all work must be created after the contest announcement.
Technical requirements: Standalone executable under 1.44MB total package size. No internet dependency. No web-based submissions.
Submission and inquiry: Through the 2P GAME ARCADE official website.
Winning entries will be showcased through 2P GAME ARCADE events and online channels following the contest.
Applications for participation and submissions can be made through the official 2P GAME ARCADE website , and detailed contest guidelines and inquiries can be found on the official website and via email.
