If you’re old enough to remember the early days of the polygonal generation in the mid-to-late ‘90s, you’ll recall when developers used the old ‘sprites for characters’ trick.
Take something like Mario Kart 64, for example. Rather than using polygons to render Mario and his chums, the game displayed them as sprites while they raced through polygonal tracks.
At the time rendering polygons was ‘expensive’ when it came to the consoles’ processing power, so this was a technique used to make characters
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