In the original Super Mario Bros., clouds and bushes are built from the exact same sprite, just with different color palettes.

Super Mario Bros. launched in 1985 on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), an era when storage was extraordinarily tight. The entire game fit onto a cartridge with just 40 kilobytes of read-only memory (ROM)—less space than a single low-resolution photo today.Shigeru Miyamoto and his Nintendo team employed clever memory-saving techniques to maximize every byte. One of the most ingenious was sprite reuse. The pixel art for clouds in the sky was identical to the bushes on the ground. By storing just one shape, developers eliminated the need to duplicate coordinate data in the game's code.The NES hardware allowed developers to apply different color palettes to the same sprite without storing duplicate graphics. A white-and-blue palette made the shape appear as a cloud, while a green-and-black palette transformed it into a bush. This elegant technique let Nintendo create visual variety across the game world while staying within the strict hardware constraints of the 1980s. Such efficiency enabled the game to deliver 32 distinct levels within its tiny file size.