What is a “sprite”?
A sprite is a generic term for a graphic that is drawn to the screen repeatedly in order to animate something. The term originated from early computer games that animated small objects or units by rapidly erasing then pasting (or “blitting”) a sequence of images to the appropriate places on the screen. Since the size of what was blitted to the screen was typically small, it took very little computing power to achieve impressive frame rates and animation sequences. As a result, game objects could be animated very quickly and smoothly (hence the name “sprite”). Many older popular games such as Command and Conquer and Starcraft gave the appearance of animated combat units, but for each unit there was actually a stored image for every possible position, direction, and state.
