syltefar.com: Tile-based Backgrounds

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Tile-based Backgrounds

Graphics in many video games from the 1980s and early 1990s with was implemented using a combination of tiles, tilemaps, and sprites. Tiles and sprites would defined using bitmaps, spatially mapped arrays of pixel color data, and tilemaps would map tiles to display positions in a fixed grid on the screen. Video controllers would take this representation of tiles and sprites and display it directly on the screen. We will refer to this type of graphics as tile-based graphics.

The benefit of tile-based graphics is lower memory usage, something absolutely critical during this era, as memory chips were prohibitively expensive. With tiles and tilemaps, full screens of graphics can be represented using a small set of tiles, repeated in the tilemap to form larger graphics. Essentially, it is a form of manual image compression.

A classic example of tile-based graphics is Namco's Pac-Man (1980), where the maze and dots are displayed using tiles. This rendering type would be ubiquitous in arcade games in the 1980s and 1990s, and several home consoles would be designed this way, including Nintendo's NES (1983) and of course, the SEGA Genesis (1988).

tag   : #tiles
games : 9

Games

Title
System
Year
Completed only
Review Score


9 games in database, 6 completed (67%). Year range: 1980-2024, median: 2016.
list - box art - screenshots

 Pac-Man                                  ***   Namco                           Arcade  1980       2 videos           21 logs
 Spelunky                                       Mossmouth                       PS4     2014       8 videos  C        16 logs
 Axiom Verge                                    Thomas Happ Games               PS4     2015       2 videos  C        12 logs
 Downwell                                       Moppin                          PS4     2016       4 videos            6 logs
 Brigador: Up-Armored Edition                                                   Win     2016       1 video             3 logs
 Micro Mages                              ***   Morphcat Games                  NES     2019       2 videos  C         6 logs
 Spelunky 2                               ***                                   PS4     2020      21 videos  C        37 logs
 Carrion                                        Phobia Game Studio              XB1     2020       4 videos  C         3 logs
 Animal Well                              ***   Shared Memory                   PS5     2024       5 videos  C        30 logs


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syltefar.com v.2.12.0 2025-08-21