Video game graphics have gone from single-color blips to photorealistic rendering in about four decades, and this film traces that arc console generation by console generation. It moves from the blocky sprites of early arcade cabinets and the Atari 2600 through the 8-bit and 16-bit eras of the NES and Sega Genesis, into the leap to 3D polygons on the PlayStation and Nintendo 64, and on toward the high-definition engines of modern consoles and PCs. Along the way it looks at the hardware limitations that forced early designers into clever tricks, like sprite flicker and palette swapping, and how each new generation of chips and memory opened up what artists could actually put on screen. The film uses screenshots and gameplay footage from landmark titles to show the differences generation to generation rather than just describe them. It is a compact visual timeline for anyone curious how a handful of colored squares turned into the graphics running today's games.