I am a huge fan of the Elite Dangerous game that was released in 2014. This was my first space sim that I felt in love and to this day is one of my favorite games to spend evenings in.
Recently, I found a great video by Mark Moxon (which, by the way, has an amazing blog!) about the first Elite game that was released back in 1984 for the BBC Micro. The crazy part is that Ian Bell and David Braben, the authors of Elite, managed to squeeze an entire 3D graphics engine, 2000 star systems, 8 galaxies and a full galactic economy into just 23K of beautifully crafted machine code!
If you can, spare some time and watch this amazing deep dive into the world of Elite!