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Sprites are typically used for characters and other moving objects in video games; for instance, the characters in Pac-Man are sprites. They are also often used for software icons, such as mouse pointers (in the form of arrows, crosshairs, etc). For on-screen moving objects larger than one sprite's extent, sprites may be scaled and/or combined. In Atari 400/800 terminology, sprite techniques were called Player-Missile Graphics, reflecting the usage for both characters ("players") and other objects ("missiles")—the latter, as the name suggests, referring to sprites as video game projectiles.

A third name for "sprite" is Movable Object Block, or MOB. This designation was used e.g. in MOS Technology's graphics chip literature (data sheets, etc). However, Commodore, the main user of MOS chips and the owner of MOS for most of the chip maker's lifetime, applied the common term "sprite".

Early video game hardware used to have special functions for drawing sprites, as writing them into the framebuffer was computationally expensive. Some also had advanced functions for detecting collisions, or for zooming and rotating them before drawing, like the Atari Lynx. Today this is usually not necessary; modern CPUs are typically fast enough to draw a large number of sprites by themselves. Even if this not sufficient, today's graphics hardware is often so flexible that it can assist the CPU in drawing/moving sprites without having specialized support for this task.

For relevant examples of well-featured sprite-handling chips of the 8-bit home computer / video game era, see the articles on the MOS Technology VIC-IIThe VIC-II (Video Interface Chip II specifically known as the MOS Technology 6567/8562/8564 ( NTSC versions), 6569/8565/8566 ( PAL), is the integrated circuit chip tasked with generating composite video graphics and DRAM refresh signals in the Commodore 6 and the Atari ANTICANTIC A lpha N umeric T elevision I nterface C ircuit was a microprocessor dedicated to generating 2D computer graphics for showing on a television screen or computer display. It was a true microprocessor, in that it had an instruction set to run programs.