Metasprite
A game character assembled from several hardware sprites, because one sprite alone is too small to be more than a head or a bullet.
Hardware sprites were tiny — 8×8 or 8×16 pixels on the NES. A figure like Mega Man or Simon Belmont was therefore built from a cluster of sprites that the engine moved as a unit, their relative offsets stored in a table. The programmer thought in metasprites; the hardware only saw loose tiles. It spent sprites from an already tight budget (eight per line on the NES), tying metasprite size directly to the risk of flicker. Modern 2D toolchains like NESmaker and homebrew libraries keep the word, now as a plain data-structure term.