The Simple Math Behind Image Rotation

Featuring an old-school game-development algorithm!

Hemanth
Street Science
Published in
8 min readMar 15, 2024

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The Math Behind Image Rotation — A grid of 9 square blocks arranged in a 3x3 grid. Each block is numbered and has a unique color. On the right, the same block has been rotated 90 degrees in the clockwise direction. An question mark in the middle asks how to do this.
The math behind image rotation — Illustration created by the author

I recently started learning videogame development and stumbled upon the topic of sprite animation. As I was goofing around with pixel-based (raster) image rotations, I wondered how the earliest game developers tackled this problem.

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