Arcade video games The use of sprites originated with
arcade video games.
Nolan Bushnell came up with the original concept when he developed the first arcade video game,
Computer Space (1971). Technical limitations made it difficult to adapt the
early mainframe game Spacewar! (1962), which performed an entire
screen refresh for every little movement, so he came up with a solution to the problem: controlling each individual game element with a dedicated
transistor. The
rockets were essentially hardwired
bitmaps that moved around the screen independently of the background, an important innovation for producing screen images more efficiently and providing the basis for sprite graphics. The earliest video games to represent
player characters as human player sprites were arcade
sports video games, beginning with
Taito's
TV Basketball, released in April 1974 and licensed to
Midway Manufacturing for release in North America. Designed by
Tomohiro Nishikado, he wanted to move beyond simple
Pong-style rectangles to character graphics, by rearranging the rectangle shapes into objects that look like
basketball players and
basketball hoops.
Ramtek released another sports video game in October 1974,
Baseball, The
Namco Galaxian arcade system board, for the 1979 arcade game
Galaxian, displays animated, multi-colored sprites over a scrolling background. It became the basis for
Nintendo's
Radar Scope and
Donkey Kong arcade hardware and
home consoles such as the
Nintendo Entertainment System. According to Steve Golson from
General Computer Corporation, the term "stamp" was used instead of "sprite" at the time.
Home systems Signetics devised the first chips capable of generating sprite graphics (referred to as
objects by Signetics) for home systems. The Signetics 2636 video processors were first used in the 1978
1292 Advanced Programmable Video System and later in the 1979
Elektor TV Games Computer. The
Atari VCS, released in 1977, has a hardware sprite implementation where five graphical objects can be moved independently of the game playfield. The term
sprite was not in use at the time. The VCS's sprites are called
movable objects in the programming manual, further identified as two
players, two
missiles, and one
ball. These each consist of a single row of pixels that are displayed on a
scan line. To produce a two-dimensional shape, the sprite's single-row bitmap is altered by software from one scan line to the next. The 1979
Atari 400 and 800 home computers have similar, but more elaborate, circuitry capable of moving eight single-color objects per scan line: four 8-bit wide
players and four 2-bit wide
missiles. Each is the full height of the display—a long, thin strip.
DMA from a table in memory automatically sets the graphics pattern registers for each scan line. Hardware registers control the horizontal position of each player and missile. Vertical motion is achieved by moving the bitmap data within a player or missile's strip. The feature was called
player/missile graphics by Atari.
Texas Instruments developed the
TMS9918 chip with sprite support for its 1979 TI-99/4 home computer. An updated version is used in the 1981
TI-99/4A.
In 2.5D and 3D games Sprites remained popular with the rise of
2.5D games (those which recreate a 3D game space from a 2D map) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A technique called
billboarding allows 2.5D games to keep onscreen sprites rotated toward the player view at all times. Some 2.5D games, such as 1993's
Doom, allow the same entity to be represented by different sprites depending on its rotation relative to the viewer, furthering the illusion of 3D. Fully 3D games usually present world objects as
3D models, but sprites are supported in some 3D
game engines, such as
GoldSrc and
Unreal, and may be billboarded or locked to fixed orientations. Sprites remain useful for small details,
particle effects, and other applications where the lack of a third dimension is not a major detriment. ==Systems with hardware sprites==