Open a sprite in Aseprite and the palette menu offers the colours of a Commodore 64, a ZX Spectrum, an NES, a Game Boy and an Amstrad CPC, among others. It is a modern program for Windows, macOS and Linux, but it is built for the kind of drawing those machines demanded: single pixels placed by hand, small fixed palettes, and animations drawn one frame at a time. Its icon is a nod to that world as well. The program’s FAQ explains that it is “a little tribute” to the rotating block in Super Mario World, which its developers call “the greatest game of all time”.
Aseprite has been going for a quarter of a century. David Capello began it in 2001 as a free program, and it became one of the tools indie developers mention most. Wireframe’s interviewer noted in 2019 that Matteo Gonano used it “like many indie developers we’ve spoken to over the past few months”, and within a few issues the magazine was calling it “the ubiquitous Aseprite” and “the ever-popular Aseprite”.
Fast facts
- Author: David Capello; now developed by Igara Studio S.A. with David, Gaspar and Martín Capello.
- First version: 2001, as ASE, the Allegro Sprite Editor.
- Runs on: Windows, macOS and Linux.
- Licence: GPL version 2 until August 2016; since then the Aseprite EULA. The source code is still published and may be compiled for personal use, but not redistributed.
- Price: first sold in June 2014 for $10; now a minimum of $19.99. A free trial cannot save files.
- Current version: 1.3.18, updated in September 2026.
From ASE to Aseprite
The program began as “ase – allegro-sprite-editor”, named after Allegro, a C library for writing games. Its early README describes a program “specially designed with facilities to create animated sprites that can be used in some video game”, released under the GNU General Public License. It kept that licence for fifteen years.
Donations did not pay for development. When version 1.0 came out on 6 June 2014, Capello wrote on the project’s blog that donations and fundraising campaigns had not worked out, so from then on the ready-made program cost $10, while the source stayed open: “you can download the code and compile it by yourself, and we would like to see more people doing this.”
Two years later the licence changed. On 26 August 2016 the GPL in the source repository was replaced by the Aseprite EULA, and version 1.1.8, released on 20 September, was the first under it. The EULA still lets anyone download the source, compile it, change it for their own use or to offer a contribution, and use the program for commercial art. What it forbids is handing copies to other people. The FAQ’s summary is short: “you cannot redistribute compiled versions of Aseprite.” Within days of the change, other developers forked the last GPL version as LibreSprite, which remains free software under the GPL version 2.
Drawing and animating
Aseprite works like an animation program cut down to the pixel. A sprite is a stack of layers and a row of frames, and the timeline shows both, with onion skinning to show the neighbouring frames faintly behind the one being drawn. Tags name the frames that make up each animation, such as a walk cycle or a jump, and the program exports the whole set as a sprite sheet with a JSON file describing where each frame sits. Colour can be indexed, as on an old machine, so a sprite is drawn with numbered palette entries instead of free colours. Version 1.3, released in November 2023, added tilemap layers for drawing tile-based backgrounds, and the program can be driven from the command line or extended with Lua scripts.
The hardware palettes that ship with it include the Apple II, Atari 2600, Commodore VIC-20, Commodore 64 and Plus/4, CGA, Amstrad CPC, MSX1 and MSX2, NES, Master System, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Virtual Boy, Teletext and the ZX Spectrum.
Who uses it
Wireframe’s pages on indie games in development kept coming back to it. The developer of The Waking Cloak called it “an amazing tool for drawing and animating pixel art” and said “I’ve found it really intuitive”; Benjamin Kiefer, making Revita, thought it “might be the best pixel art software out there when it comes to pixel art and animation”; Anton Kudin said “I always start sketching pixel art in Aseprite” before moving his MegaSphere art into another program for effects. Public reference works list TowerFall (2013) and Celeste (2018) among the better-known games made with it.
It is used for new games on old machines too. In 2025 Next Magazine reported that the ZX Spectrum Next game Torvin – Echo of the Realms sped up once Paul “Spectre” Hartnel brought in “Aseprite for handling sprite and screen graphics”, alongside the map editor Tiled.
Sources
- ASE (Allegro Sprite Editor) README, version 0.5, in the Aseprite source repository (web, secondary): the name, the 2001 copyright, the GPL, the description. https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/tree/0.5
- David Capello, “Aseprite 1.0 released!”, Aseprite blog, 6 June 2014 (web, secondary): donations, the $10 price, the source staying open. https://blog.aseprite.org/2014/06/06/aseprite-10-released/
- Aseprite source repository (web, secondary): commit “Replace GPL license with the new EULA”, 26 August 2016; the EULA text; release 1.1.8, 20 September 2016; release 1.3, 27 November 2023; release 1.3.18.6, 22 September 2026; the hardware palette extension. https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite
- Aseprite FAQ and trial page (web, secondary): open source from 2001 until August 2016, what the EULA allows, the $19.99 minimum price, the trial that cannot save, the icon. https://www.aseprite.org/faq/
- Aseprite blog, “Aseprite v1.3”, 27 November 2023 (web, secondary): tilemap layers. https://blog.aseprite.org/2023/11/27/aseprite-v13/
- LibreSprite repository (web, secondary): “Fork of the last GPLv2 commit of Aseprite”, created 31 August 2016. https://github.com/LibreSprite/LibreSprite
- Wikipedia, “Aseprite” (web, secondary): the developers’ names, Igara Studio S.A., features, TowerFall and Celeste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aseprite
- Wireframe issue 10, March 2019, pp. 24–25: The Waking Cloak.
- Wireframe issue 11, April 2019, pp. 24–25: Matteo Gonano, Project Starship X.
- Wireframe issue 20, August 2019, pp. 23–24: Benjamin Kiefer, Revita.
- Wireframe issue 21, August 2019, pp. 23–24: Anton Kudin, MegaSphere.
- Wireframe issue 24, October 2019, pp. 22–23: “the ubiquitous Aseprite”.
- Wireframe issue 33, February 2020, pp. 24–25: “the ever-popular Aseprite”.
- Next Magazine issue 11, December 2025, pp. 40–41: John Weatherley on Torvin – Echo of the Realms.