Comment by bitwize

One of the interesting factoids about the TI-99 series is that despite its lack of popularity compared to Apple and Commodore, it gave us the word "sprite" as a term of art in game graphics. The movable graphical elements of contemporary console displays, called "player-missile graphics" by Atari, "MOBs" by Commodore, and "OBJs" by Nintendo in their PPU documentation, were referred to as "sprites" in the design notes and patent application for the TMS9918 VDP used in the TI-99/4 (and its successor, the TMS9918A used in the TI-99/4A), doubtless as a reflection of the way they moved about completely independently of the underlying background tile map. The word appeared in the manuals for TI Extended BASIC and TI Logo, which gave even hobbyist programmers the ability to create and control these objects, and from there the word filtered out into the broader community, to the point where Commodore 128 BASIC had a SPRITE keyword. It's a very sticky term, easy to remember and eventually adopted by the whole community, and I'm kind of glad it came from the design process for my beloved TI-99/4A.

The TMS9918 would go on to be used in several other game consoles including the Sega SG1000, original MSX, and ColecoVision, in modified form in still more (all Sega consoles up through the Genesis), and inform the design of yet more (Nintendo's PPU). It was one of the first display chips to support sprites as full graphics, rather than a single row of a pixmap which must be reprogrammed every scanline (as Atari's player-missile graphics on the 2600 were).