What is a sprite graphic?

Sprites are static or animated bitmap images often found as user interface icons, 2D objects in video games and small website images. Most popular in the 1980s and 1990s as for representing characters and objects in video games, they have now been replaced mostly by the 3D polygon.

In more recent years, many web developers use sprite sheets, or large graphics containing many icons or graphics, to limit the amount of requests made to the website servers. The sprite sheets are loaded into the cache of the Internet browser and are positioned via CSS to show the correct sprite through the visible viewport.