Game over

The "Game Over" screen from Torus Trooper.

"Game over" is a message in video games which signals that people failed a game, commonly due to a negative outcome such as losing all of one's lives - although the phrase sometimes follows its score after successful completion of a game.^[1] The phrase has since seen wider use to describe the end of an event in real life.

History

The phrase was used as early as the 1950s in devices such as electromechanical pinball machines, which would light up the phrase with a lamp (lightbulb).^[2]

Before the advent of home consoles and personal computing, arcades were the predominant platform for playing games, which required users to deposit a token or coin (traditionally a quarter, in the U.S.) into an arcade game machine in order to play. Players would usually be given a finite number of lives (or attempts) to progress through the game, the exhaustion of which would usually result in the display of the message "Game Over" indicating that the game had ended. The phrase might also be followed by the message "Play Again?" and a prompt asking the player to insert additional tokens to prevent the game from terminating and instead allowing the player to continue their progress. The message can also be seen flashing on certain arcade games while in attract mode, until a player inserts a credit; at this point the message would change to the number of credits inserted and "Press 1 or 2 player start", or some variation thereof.

As these games were ported to home consoles, the "Game Over" screen and "Continue?" prompt remained, but often required only the press of a button to keep the game going; while the video game industry shifted away from being arcade-focused to being home gaming-focused, the inclusion of such a screen was no longer as critical since it offered no financial benefit. However, the concept of Game Over remained imbued in the medium thereafter as a way to add an element of risk: a player who is unsuccessful at carrying out the game's objective (possibly repeatedly) will be faced with such a screen and be forced to start over from either the beginning of the game or a previous, saved state.

With the development of the aforementioned save function (complemented by the less popular password system, which is now seen as archaic), the Game Over message has become less common as players are allowed to respawn at a previous state of the game, which has been stored in memory either through a player deliberately saving the game or reaching a checkpoint (which causes the game to save automatically). Many modern games do not technically "end" until they are completed, and although "Game Over" screens remain present in many of them in some form or another it is exceptionally rare for them to signify a forced return to the beginning of the game.

"Game Over" has seen some variations in certain games. For instance, upon the death of the player character Little King's Story shows the message "LIFE OVER". Other instances include Catherine, which uses "LOVE IS OVER" and Nights Into Dreams, which displays the message "NIGHT OVER". Screens that display at equivalent points in other games are also considered "Game Over" screens, even if the message that is displayed is entirely different (such as "YOU ARE DEAD", seen in Resident Evil, God of War and Total Distortion, among others, and "GOOD NIGHT", seen in Klonoa: Door to Phantomile and its successors). Some game over variations use literary references such as Abandon All Hope in Devil May Cry 4, and Dante's Inferno which uses a quote from the book of the same name every time the player dies. Rule of Rose uses a short non-rhyming poem about a little princess that dies, beginning with the words "Little princess, little princess, precious little princess..." and ending with "And everyone lived happily ever after. END". In Super Street Fighter 2 the defeated character portrait stops moving and they scream in pain and fade into ash. In The Terminator if Kyle Reese is killed a game over screen appears saying "Kyle Reese Terminated".

Outside video gaming

The phrase is occasionally used to indicate the end of an argument or process in real life. In January 2011, protesters and rioters in several North African and Middle Eastern countries used the slogan "Game Over" on banners to express their anti-government sentiments.^[3]

"Game over" is also sometimes used as a phrase to concede defeat, as for example in the movie Aliens where one of the protagonists, Private William Hudson (Bill Paxton), shouts, "Game over, man!" after the dropship meant to rescue him and his expedition is destroyed.^[4] Paxton's use of the phrase was popularised to the extent that it was included in Microsoft Fury3 in 1995, possibly inadvertently. Later it was used in shortened form in the SNES game adaptation of Alien 3,^[5] despite the Hudson character not appearing in the film. Rights issues prevented the actual audio from Aliens being used and the sample was a rerecording made by Paxton specifically for the game. Interestingly, the 'Game Over' line for which Hudson is arguably most well-known wasn't even in the 'Aliens' script, but was a spur-of-the-moment ad lib by Paxton.^[6]

The phrase is also used various times in the Saw movie series, because of the antagonist's penchant for referring to the traps he creates as "games".

"Game Over" was projected, via laser scanner, onto government buildings at the end of the 2013 Egyptian protests.^[7]

See also

Look up game over in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Attract mode
• 1-up
• Checkpoint (video gaming)
• Continue (video gaming)
• Video games with multiple endings
• Kill screen

References