Floor 796 never ends, and one person is drawing it

Somewhere on the 796th floor of an enormous space station, thousands of tiny animated people are living their absurd lives simultaneously, and one artist has been drawing them, scene by scene, for years.

Floor 796 is an ever-expanding isometric animation. You pan across it like a map and zoom from the whole sprawling floor down to individual rooms where the jokes live: movie references, meme reenactments, tiny dramas in elevators. The floor grows as new scenes get drawn onto its edge, which means the artwork is never finished, only larger than it was last month.

The receipts, in both directions

The loop is 60 frames, five seconds at 12 frames per second, and by the time the maker wrote up his renderer in 2022 the scene had grown to 5,000 by 5,000 pixels of it, every frame hand-placed. The artist goes by 0x00: in an interview with 80 Level he describes himself as a Belarusian web developer, a CTO by day, who learned animation building Flash games in school, and who now budgets about two months of weekends per scene. Every scene is drawn in a Flash-style animation editor he built himself, in a fixed palette of exactly 4,356 colors. Others can submit scenes through that same in-browser editor, provided they match the house style; the site still credits all the animation to him.

A video format invented for one artwork

Here is where it gets properly nerdy. His own engineering writeup (Russian, worth the machine translation) explains why ordinary video could not carry the piece: mp4 cannot keep multiple synchronized loops in lockstep, goes soft when you zoom into pixel art, and hiccups every time a loop restarts. So he invented his own format. Frames are color-quantized, encoded as deltas against a single keyframe, run-length compressed for an 83 percent cut, deduplicated across frames for another third, then gzipped. One gigabyte of PNG frames becomes an 82-megabyte stream.

In your browser, Web Workers decompress each visible chunk of the floor in 5 to 20 milliseconds against the 83-millisecond budget that 12 fps allows, and a plain 2D canvas draws the result. No WebGL anywhere. One worker per visible section, roughly half a gigabyte of memory at the ceiling, and years of hand labor scrolling on a phone without a loading bar worth mentioning.

This is the category of thing the internet was accidentally built for: one person's incomprehensible patience, distributed to everyone, free, with a zoom control. Museums would kill for it. It lives at a URL. It shares a shelf with the artist who draws full illustrations inside a single HTML div, in the small club of people who chose an absurd constraint and then honored it for years.

Budget warning: the search-for-references game is a trap with no bottom. Start at the elevator bank. You will know the one.