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 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. Much video game hardware from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s had native support for displaying tiled screens with little interaction from the CPU. Tile-based games usually simulate a top-down, side view, or 2.5D view of the playing area, and are almost always two-dimensional. The complete set of tiles available for use in a playing area is called a tileset.

That the screen is made of such tiles is a technical distinction, and may not be obvious to people playing the game. An oblique texture atlas in the style of Ultima VIĪ tile-based video game is a type of video or video game where the playing area consists of small square (or, much less often, rectangular, parallelogram, or hexagonal) graphic images referred to as tiles laid out in a grid.

Atlas mmo map grid