The Atari 2600 supported sprites: two "players", two "missiles", and one "ball", that could be moved freely over the low resolution playfield. However, their bitmaps were only one pixel high; you had to change them on each scanline in order to get taller images.

Rectangular bitmap sprites may have debuted in consumer hardware with the TI-99/4 in 1979; the term "sprite" comes from the technical documentation for that computer.