Why, in The Legend of Zelda, was the maximum rupees 255? Why not 250? Why not 999? Well, there are exatly 8 good reasons. And they are all 1′s. 11111111, to be exact. One byte expressing the number 256. The number of rupies you hold in The Legend of Zelda is stored in a single byte, representing your current rupees, 0-255. Brilliant.
This also explains why there are 256 levels in PacMan. There was only one byte used to store your level, so when you beat level 256, the game tries to calculate the next level (actually, the next “fruit”) and corrupts the screen. Zelda was a little smarter and ignored any digits past 256.
It’s all so simple and beautiful.
Source: SydLexia – my new favorite site.
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I actually knew that. Not exactly as in that I knew definitively, but in programming it’s common to break down operations into chunks of 256.
So it was early on when I defined a variable as a byte that I thought- “Oh, that explains the 255 Rupees thing”
Crazy that memory usage was so important that they couldn’t spare an extra byte, and now you could fit 4 million copies of Zelda on a key chain.