[Galanwe]

Agree. Programming video games in the early 2000s, TGA was my goto format. Dead simple to parse and upload to OpenGL, support for transparency, true colors, all boxes ticked.

[Tepix]

I had forgotten about that but yes, TGA was easy to deal with even doing low level programming.

[actionfromafar]

I always used PCX for some reason I can't remember.

[influx]

I once wrote a PCX decoder in Pascal outputting VGA w/mode 13. The cool part for me was it had run length encoding, which I was able to figure out trivially just reading the spec. May not have been the most efficient, but way easier than trying to figure out GIF!

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Possibly because it was also used by Andre LaMothe's original Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus book?