Atari used the term redefined characters and not tiles. In most modes, individual monochrome characters can be displayed in one of four colors others allow characters to be constructed of 2-bit (4 color) pixels instead. The video coprocessor provides different modes for displaying character grids. 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. The Atari 400/800 home computers, released in 1979, allow the standard character set to be replaced by a custom one. Home computers had hardware tile support in the form of ASCII characters arranged in a grid, usually for the purposes of displaying text, but games could be written using letters and punctuation as game elements. Video game consoles such as the Intellivision, released in 1979, were designed to use tile-based graphics, since their games had to fit into video game cartridges as small as 4K in size, and all games on the platform were tile-based. 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). It used a tile size of 8×8 pixels, which since became the most common tile size used in video games. The tile-map model was introduced to video games by Namco's arcade game Galaxian ( 1979), which ran on the Namco Galaxian arcade system board, capable of displaying multiple colors per tile as well as scrolling.
Ultima 7 uses a "tile," "chunk" and "superchunk" three-layer system to construct an enormous, detailed world within the PCs of the early 1990s. Variations include level data using "material tiles" that are procedurally transformed into the final tile graphics, and groupings of tiles as larger-scale "supertiles" or "chunks," allowing large tiled worlds to be constructed under heavy memory constraints. Examples of tile-based game engine/ IDEs include RPG Maker, Game Maker, Construct, and Godot. This approach allows for simple, visual map data, letting level designers create entire worlds with a tile reference sheet and perhaps a text editor, a paint program, or a simple level editor (many older games included the editor in the game).
They also store metadata about the tiles, such as collision, damage, and entities, either with a 2-dimensional array mapping the tiles, or a second texture atlas mirroring the visual one but coding metadata by colour. Tile-based video games usually use a texture atlas for performance reasons. Tiles allow developers to build with a set of reusable components instead of drawing everything individually. Ultima III and Civilization draw the tiles via software, while the maze in the original arcade version of Pac-Man is made of tiles displayed by the game's graphics hardware. For example, Pac-Man is an action game, Ultima III is a role-playing video game and Civilization is a turn-based strategy game, but all three render the world as tiles. The term refers to the technology that the hardware or game engine uses for its visual representation. Tile-based games are not a distinct video game genre.