How to animate 8-bit

I've been looking how creators of 2d game developers of creating their games, here are two useful information I've found:

Sprite (computer graphics)
Sprites in video games are usually the character itself. Eboy done a Sprite sheet poster which made it very unique design.

Sprite sheets:

So it's sort of like flash movie clips symbols.

For more information for Sprite please check out the link below:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(computer_graphics)

Parallax scrolling:
This is how they composited the layers of the game to create an indepth perspective:

For more information for Parallax scrolling please check out the link below:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_scrolling