Given the ever growing and changing art of gaming it's inevitable that some of the cliches and trends of the day would get whittled out as the years went by. It is, afterall, the course of life to be forever evolving, and art initiates life, no? Still, the consequence is that sometimes the things we love slowly become unrecognisable, and that's the sentiment I hear some people who played the video games of yesteryear share. Most typically people will note that games have become easier, which is true for many a reason, and that back in day there used to be habit for limited lives. And doesn't that seem odd, why oh why was limited lives such a universal thing in the old school of gaming? Especially as nowadays such features are indicative of super hardcore and unforgiving gamemodes. Well, let's postulate.
The first most obvious answer is the most sensible, as it comes down to money. Lacking the home consoles and mobile phone games of the modern age, when gaming started to first become commercially viable it did so through arcade cabinets which kids would spend their money on in order to play. You'd sink some money, play for a bit, die brutally and then slap in some more money; the cycle of arcade machines. Arcade games, for purely financial reasons, would be in their best interest to be both hard and punishing, so that they could extract as money nickle and dimes from their customer base as humanely possible. These almost hostile relationships between consumer and product created an environment where players had to challenge themselves with superior reaction times in order to save on their money, as well as for pure entertainment. Titles like Dragon's Lair, in which death was forever just a single miss-input away, raked in the most income, which shows you the the model to which game difficulty intentionally trended.
Of course, even when games started to get their home console releases, this bitter difficulty followed the game industry well into it's first few generations. Even when we started getting save systems after the innovation of The Legend of Zelda, limited lives were still a stable of just about every game until about the mid to late nineties. Now some of that is waste and leftover from the way that games used to be made, but another is a hold-on of design that fit in line with the way that video games were evolving even on home console. What you must remember is that those early game cartridges and consoles had very limited capabilities in terms of RAM and storage. No game could be a large enough adventure to warrant repeated play sessions, not just because of the lack of saving as a concept. Games retaining the lives system and their trial and failure difficulty helped pad out the length of these products so they engaged the customer for longer.
And after saving was introduced? Well then it started to become more of just a hold-on piece of technology from an antiquated style of game development. As games started becoming capable of being longer, difficulty fell off as a key focusing factor of design, now there was such a thing as replayability and several game play loops stitched together. Even further down the line and the idea of narrative stories being told through gaming started to become popular, at which point throwing in a 'lives' system and 'game over' screen seemed somewhat juvenile when compared to the barriers that the industry was clearing over in it's path to self improvement. As gameplay became more complex and involved, factors started to be shaved off the game development package as they became deemed 'unnecessary'. Limited lives proved to be more annoying than enriching in more modern products, and now the world of norms has flipped completely; games with limited lives are the outliers of society today!
Sonic is a franchise that has stayed staunchly married to it's old school ideals of a life system, even when the rest of the game has modernised and out grown it. In Sonic Adventure, despite that game being a mostly narrative driven story, you have lives to maintain; although when you run out it isn't game over; you just have to start from the beginning of the level instead of from that level's checkpoint. (Which is still pretty damn inconvenient; that final boss is a life siphon!) And even more modern games like Sonic Generations have a life system, even though it mixes 2d gameplay philosophy with 3d game design philosophy which often clashes. Lost World went so far as to thrown in a 25 extra lives preorder bonus, and Sonic Forces kept itself staunchly married to the antiquated Sonic gimmick of a level timer. Even though the limit of that timer was one hour per mission, in a game with missions that average the length of one minute to two. So perhaps modern Sonic Team weren't so invested in making sensible design choices.
But just because lives have gone away, that doesn't mean the world has lost all interest in the idea of death consequences. In fact, I'd argue that 'permadeath' and 'Roguelikes' are ideals that bring us back to the same sort of mindset as live systems in games. Roguelikes are typically more condensed and highly tweaked games that focus around replayability and the fun of starting over from the beginning again and again. With the added bonus that for most of the best rougelikes, failure spawns advantages that can be used in your next run making sure that your time playing the game never truly feels wasted, thus fixing one of the key flaws with the Lives system. This allows some Roguelikes to be tough as nails without feeling demoralising and a waste of effort.
Permadeath is typically even more hardcore and leans heavily on the idea of immutable consequence. The weight of what you have to lose can be enough to scare the player into being more clever and measured in their approach to problem solving, with the threat of a noose hanging over their heads ready to take all progress in an instant. This can be limited to permadeath of a character within a rooster, such as for squad based games, or maybe even the entire player character overall. (Typically found more in indie experiences. Mainstream games aren't quite brave enough to go there.) And maybe even just characters that can die if you screw up enough in a story based game, such as is the case with Quantic Dreams style games... it was actually one of the big selling points of Heavy Rain.
The Arcade beginnings of mainstream gaming still do have their routes in the modern psychology of game design, and not always in obvious ways. The essence of limited lives and what it meant for games of it's time, is still well and alive in conscious design choices that are made today. It's one of the many reasons why I roll my eyes whenever people say that 'New games are too easy, old games used to have difficulty to them'; typically conflating intentional frustration and antiquated design concepts with compelling and insightful complexity. Some of the best games of today can keep their simple mechanics and others can loose themselves in deep complexity, creating some of the most challenging and intriguing experiences in gaming today, all with their new framework of unlimited lives.
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