Limbering up for my L4D playdate this evening reminded me of the rather brilliant Left 4k Dead which did the rounds some time ago, which in turn made me think of other brilliant tiny games.

Grandaddy, of course, is Wolfenstein 5k, but you might have trouble getting it to run in your space-faring, jet-pack-toting browser-of-the-future. Current darling is the 5k Lunar Lander, where Seb Lee-Delisle shows off by doing first a straight remake and then a 3D version in under 5120 bytes, as part of a competition run by the rather awesome sounding  £5 App club. Which just goes to show that 5k is probably a bit generous, surely the thinking behind the annual Java 4k compo, which this year has a reworking of PixelJunk Eden, some improbably lavish atmospherics, courtesy of 4bsolution, and a nice crisp Tetris-meets-that-colour-clearing-game-I-don’t-know-the-name-of.

4k starting to look a bit too generous? Then why not take a stab at Tetris in 500 bytes? Sick of all this reductivist retroism? Then check out what 432k can get you, which turns out to be blowing up Battersea Power Station, complete with smoke and sound, in A New Zero, which also wins my favourite-game-FAQ-ever award.

Still to big for your tastes? Then fetch your reading glasses and head over to Defender of the Favicon. If you get there and you can’t spot the game, then you’ve rather missed the tiny, tiny point.