http://mdb.classicgaming.gamespy.com/m1/lvldata.htm

It's an interesting read.

Simple, yet such a good system for making the levels.

I'm reminded of the data internals in Pathways into Darkness.

Heh, funny as Sketchfighter has often been compared with Metroid, and I can tell you that programmers had much, much stricter memory constrainst back then, no 8-byte floating point values or 4-byte integers or full ASCII names for sprites in these Metroid levels...

All of those old games which were so large in scope, and yet had so little to work with, really put modern games to shame. Limits force ingenuity...having no limits can be a disservice.

Which is one reason the Wii looks so good. It's something that can inspire, instead of just a really really large blank page like the Xbox 360 and PS3.