[sgtnoodle]

A lot of old video games with impressive graphics were implemented sort of like that. Rather than storing bitmap data, the algorithm to render the artwork would be executed on the fly. It was actually faster than doing otherwise, since hard drives were so slow and the algorithm itself could fit in ram.

Tangentially related is the crash bandicoot game on the playstation. The developers figured out that untextured polygons were way faster to draw than textured polygons, and so they made the player character model out of tons of tiny colored polygons rather than fewer larger textured polygons. The result was a significantly better looking graphic for the same rendering time.