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Comment by TheCapeGreek | Hacker News Reader

For the non-gamers or those who didn't play it: Spore used to do this with all its creations[0]. You could export them as PNGs and drag and drop them into an editor to load the content. The image itself was a thumbnail of the creation. That's how every creation was shared between the official servers and between users on the forums. Very neat & niche use case.

[0]https://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200806/spore_creature_creator...

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I can think of Exapunks[1] (by Zachtronics) which uses a similar concept; you can create games for a virtual device called the "TEC Redshift" and to share the solutions between the players, the game creates a cartridge picture with the name of your solution. The instructions are embedded into the file, and you simply have to drag&drop it into the game to import the solution.

It's a neat way of sharing save files!

[1] https://www.zachtronics.com/exapunks/

The Pico-8 virtual console also stores games as PNG. What you see as the game cart is the game.

https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php https://pico-8.fandom.com/wiki/P8PNGFileFormat

So did Fractint in the early 1990s; it saved the coordinates and other settings in separate tags of the GIF image, so you could just load a previously saved image and keep panning and zooming.

Hydrus also distributes plugins as encoded images.

https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/index.html

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