Tile-based video game

Much video game hardware from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s has native support for displaying tiled screens with little interaction from the CPU.

Ultima 7 uses a "tile," "chunk" and "superchunk" three-layer system to construct an enormous, detailed world within the PCs of the early 1990s.

A tilemap consisting of 8×8 tiles required 64 times less memory and processing time than a non-tiled framebuffer, which allowed Galaxian's tile-map system to display more sophisticated graphics, and with better performance, than the more intensive framebuffer system previously used by Space Invaders (1978).

[2][3] The new characters don't have to be glyphs, but the walls of a maze or ladders or any game graphics that fit in an 8x8 pixel square.

[citation needed] The top-down perspective evolved to a simulated 45-degree angle, seen in 1994's Final Fantasy VI, allowing the player to see both the top and one side of objects, to give more sense of depth; this style dominated 8-bit and 16-bit console role-playing games.

Notable titles include: Hexagonal tile-based games have been limited for the most part to the strategy and wargaming genres.