[hinterlands]

The actual claim is that you can keep the game state for a rather minimal 8x4 game board in two uint32_t, one uint64_t, and one uint_8t.

That's not the entirety of program state - stack aside, there are some loop counters that the author isn't including in the total, along with some implicit variables e.g., for keypress data.

It's a nice optimization exercise, but the result is not particularly mind-blowing to me. You could probably make it significantly more compact at the expense of readability. For one, the shape of the snake on the game board is not random: there's plenty of combinations, such as an alternating checkerboard pattern, that are physically impossible. So the shape is likely compressible.

[im3w1l]

Unless you race the beam the shape will be there in graphics memory which you could read out.