Enter VXP. The NMS codec could compress audio files (sound effects and background music) down to incredibly small sizes (5-10kb per second) without completely destroying the audio quality. It was the perfect middleware for mobile game developers.

Developers like , Digital Chocolate , Fishlabs , and Polarbit were doing things that seemed impossible: rendering 3D worlds on 100MHz processors while playing compressed voice acting through a tinny earpiece speaker.

This article dives deep into the technical origins, the historical significance, and the legacy of VXP games. VXP stands for Variable-rate XPRession . In layman's terms, it is a proprietary audio compression codec developed by a company called NMS Communications .