Dave and Chris talked about a microcontroller contest in The Amp Hour, with the goal to create a cool project with just 1k flash of a small microcontroller, like a speaker independent speech recognition system.
This project demonstrates that you can do some awesome old-school demo scene video and audio synthesis with just one ATtiny15 running at 1.6 MHz, in 1k flash and 32 bytes of RAM:
I know, it is a lot of work to organize such a contest, but I would join it and try to implement something for it. Demonstrating some of the projects could result in some interesting videos for the EEVblog, too.
Ideas for the rules: use any microcontroller you want, which has 1k flash/ROM or less and 1k RAM or less (the native 1k word size should count, like 12-bit 1k for some PICs, and maybe it is useful to allow larger chips, as long as the program and RAM usage is just 1k each, but maybe it is a good challenge to allow only the small chips with less than 1k flash). Only one microcontroller is allowed. Any external parts are allowed, like LEDs, as long as they are less complex (in sum, transistor count etc.) than the microcontroller. Might be useful to define some exceptions for non-programmable function blocks, like a matrix display is allowed, even if the driver chip might be more complex than the microcontroller, or connecting it to a monitor or PS/2 keyboard is allowed.