heaven7
A 64k intro by Exceed (2000) that ray-traced reflective spheres in real time — long before graphics cards did.
Shown at Mekka & Symposium 2000, it became a reference point overnight. Packed into 64 kilobytes was a real-time ray tracer, sending the camera gliding through mirrored and refracting spheres over a checkerboard floor — exactly the kind of scene that took minutes per frame on 90s hardware, here animated live on a Pentium.
The point wasn't just the size but that ray tracing could run in real time on a CPU at all, a couple of decades before hardware-accelerated ray tracing (RTX) became routine. Alongside .kkrieger, it's one of the intros people reach for when they want to explain what the demoscene actually does.