THIS TWEET CONTAINS A FULL PLAYABLE GAME ON TWITTER

This tweet contains an entirely playable retro-style arcade game, and it actually works.

A 280-character tweet might not seem like a lot of space, but if you are creative enough, it is actually just enough to program a playable video game.

This was the challenge for the security engineer, Alok Menghrajani, and he managed to squeeze a CD-ROM holding retro-style game into the space of a single tweet. After two weekends he had successfully coded the video game that can be booted up in a virtual machine, or burned onto a physical disk.

The game, Menghrajani told Motherboard, is kind of like a cross between Tron and Snake.

perl -E 'say"A"x46422,"BDRDAwMQFFTCBUT1JJVE8gU1BFQ0lGSUNBVElPTg","A"x54,"Ew","A"x2634,"/0NEMDAxAQ","A"x2721,"BAAAAYQ","A"x30,"SVVVqogAAAAAAAEAF","A"x2676,"LMBaACgB76gfbgTAM0Qv8D4uYAI86qqgcc+AXP45GA8SHIRPFB3DTeYSEhyBSwCa8CwicMB3rSGtkDNFSYwJHvc68MA","VapVqlWq"x330'|base64 -D>cd.iso

— alokmenghrajani (@alokmenghrajani) June 15, 2018

The Square employee has also managed to fit an entire bootable floppy disk containing a video game into a 140-character tweet. The current game takes advantage of Twitter's recent double character limit, which allows him to create a CD-ROM-compatible game in 277 characters. He says that the inspiration came after researching the CD format at work and realizing that he could actually program functions with minimal characters. 

For those out there that know how to programme, the process of cramming all of that code into this tiny space is known as "code golfing"; where people try to reach an objective, create a program, or even solve a puzzle in the fewest lines of code as possible (or in this case, the least amount of characters). The golfing namesake draws from the sport, where the fewest number of strokes (or keystrokes, in this case) "wins."

"I find it relaxing," Menghrajani said. "It’s a way to meditate for me." You can try his game here, assuming you still have a computer that can load a CD or a floppy disk.