So back in at least the 1st and 2nd video game generations (pong clones, Atari 2600, Fairchild, Odyssey, etc.), all game graphics, sound effects and music were created programmatically in code. If you wanted a little person to be the main character, you had to plot out and draw the pixels for them. Music was done by manually sending signals to the sound chip, or something similar.

But when did this change? I figure with music it is pretty simple: CDs being used as the storage media brought real music being worked on externally that was then simply packed-in with the game. But what about the graphics? At what point in game history did developers stop writing code to create their graphic assets, and start actually drawing them in paint-like programs and import them into the game?

Specifically, were art assets for the NES (Famicom) created in code, or imported somehow from art programs? The NES is the one I can't really pin-point, since it seems like everything before was created programmatically, and everything in the generations to follow have clear signs that the graphics were imported (such as digitized images in games like Mortal Kombat or NBA Jam on the SNES).

NES graphics could be created in bitmap form in a paint utility, and saved in a format usable by the game.

Even since the earliest days people were drawing out graphics in some form before making them part of the game.

For example on the BBC micro simple sprites could be drawn in an 8x8 grid, where each row was represented by a byte and each pixel a bit in that byte. Developers and artists would draw the sprite on graph paper and then write the numbers 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1 across the top of the drawing. They'd then calculate the value for each row and put these into a sequence of 8 bytes to draw the sprite.

...It wasn't long at all before people got bored of this and created the first sprite editors, so even in the early 80s people were still using programs to make graphics rather than by hand because it was faster. These programs were still programmer oriented though not artist oriented with screens full of hex numbers and bad user interfaces.

Here ends today's history lesson!

Ahh, nice! Thank you :)

I can remember using graphical sprite editors on the ZX Spectrum and the c64.

I created a simple sprite editor for the TI-99/4a... I'm sure there was one available for devs at the time.

Back in the old days I created this for editing my own sprite format:

Similar idea...

I created a simple sprite editor for the TI-99/4a... I'm sure there was one available for devs at the time.

I didn't have a sprite editor. That's how I mastered hex as bit patterns, converting hand-drawn sprites into those 16-value hex strings.

30 years later and I can still build those stupid things: "00002400423b0000" Thanks for the fun memory of some annoying-at-the-time efforts.