Run Length Encoding has a generalized form, called Lempel-Ziv or
LZ77. RLE keeps track of one previous byte,* and a "run" is repeats of L copies of that byte. LZ77 keeps track of a history of more bytes, and a "run" copies starting from any point in the history buffer. This allows an RLE-style run (e.g. start offset = -1, run length = 10), but it also allows repeating a sequence of bytes (e.g. start offset = -5, run length = 10) or repeating a string from the history buffer (e.g. start offset = -35, run length = 5). A lot of games especially on the Super NES and GBA used LZ77, and the .zip and .png formats use LZ77 combined with Huffman coding.
* Here, I use "byte" to refer to code units. These can be larger than 1 octet in some cases, such as compression of high- or true-color images.