Remember, back in the day, when games would give you a limited number (typically 3) of lives to beat the game? Remember back when it was worth looking for 1-ups and sometimes even taking a risk to get them?

These days, it seems like 1-ups and their importance have gone away.
* Not many games use the limited lives mechanic. Often, games just give you a single life (albeit with more health) and dying gives you a game over screen, or there's games like Celeste that simply give you infinite lives. (Note that that does not make Celeste easy.) Or you have games like Shovel Knight where you drop money when you die instead of having limited lives.
* Even in games that have lives, it's not as if they're in short supply. See modern Super Mario games, where running out of lives is not an issue that most players will likely run into.

So, any thoughts? What's the last game you played where 1-ups felt meaningful and worth their while?

GTA II. I remember loading up GTA III for the first time and thought that it was really dumbing things down by removing the lives mechanic.

However, to be honest, I've lost patience with games with limited numbers of lives, or where you can't save and load either without restriction or with limited restrictions. I just don't have the time or patience to try and do a perfect end to end run in a game any more; there are a lot of things that I don't like with modern (non-Indie) games, but getting rid of lives isn't one of them.

in the olden times it was a mechanic that had two purposes

1) - in arcades, limit the time you played, therefore increasing profit

2) - partly due to arcade comversions, but mainly to make the games harder to beat and therfore make the game seems longer as you have to play it again and again to until you got good enough.

I am glad that in a game today, it is mostly gone. Sure, arcade games still need them, but adveture games, platformers, etc, don't need them. I would now find it annoying have spent 10 hours in a game to start all over from the beginning again

Limited lives and time limits are my two pet hates in games.

I want to play the games the way I want, I want to experiment, and I want to take my time.

Chronologically or last played? Because I think...Actraiser is the last time I played a game where the lives felt meaningful; they were more attempts of the avatar of an immortal capital (G)od. So instead of "Game Over", more akin to "Steady yourself and approach once more!"

Otherwise I tend to take a cynical look towards lives; as one would consider the difficulty of Ghosts & Goblins various console ports a dubious excuse in game design as there's no place to put quarters into the console and for a further point, Japanese gamedevs gave no flying rats about rental weekends.

As an addendum: As Amok says, getting gonged by a time limit feels like an insult not only to the player, but also the entire design team. Want to look at the beautiful work they've made? TOO BAD, HERE'S A BELL TO STALK YOU.

Insert coin to continue?

In my mind not much has changed in some fields, most namedly roguelikes.

One example that personally sticks out to me is Wolfenstein 3D vs. Doom.

Wolfesntein 3D had limited lives. You earned extra lives from "1-Up" bonus life orbs (usually in hidden rooms) as well as after every 60,000 points (or something like that - don't remember the exact amount). For that matter, it's also worth mentioning that Wolf3D had points and a high score table -- much like a classic arcade style game.

Then Doom did away with lives (and score) -- when you died you just restarted the level with a basic gun an very limited ammo. You still wanted to avoid dying, but the developers seemed to acknowledge that with quick save/quick load, keeping track of lives was sort of a moot point.

To the point of your question, though: I don't think 1-ups felt meaningful Wolfenstein 3D. Rather, for me personally that was the first game where I felt that 1-ups had completely lost their significance. (I know there's other examples before that -- but Wolf3D was my personal "a-ha" moment around that.)

True, it made no sense for lives to even be in Wolf3D but the same could be said for a lot of Apogee's platform games. If you have an option to reload after a screw up or if there was never an arcade version of Wolf3D (or whatever game), why bother having a limited number of lives at all?

One reason could be "nostalgia".

Some game devs(usually the younger ones who seem to be more into retro gaming as some sort of fad) seem to think adding any old game mechanics into a game will make it an instant hit with players, so they will sometimes toss them in to score nostalgia points.....things like: pixel graphics, limited(or no) saves, etc.

The problem with that method of implementation is that sometimes they either add some of the more annoying mechanics in or they implement them poorly.

Well, considering the multiple lives mechanic was trying to coax quarters out of arcade players' pockets, the fact that the mechanic has depreciated over time is no surprise. A mechanic that was designed to be just enough of a roadblock to make you cough up money should have gone away.

On another note, how would you (or anyone else who wants to respond) feel about games that charge a small fee to play, per play. Almost like the current F2P model in mobile markets, but rather like the old arcade. You pony up $0.50 every time you play., $0.25 to continue? It's less insidious than many MTX these days in that it's more honest than some.

1-ups were intentionally rare in the interest of not allowing players to get too far on one play. Personally, I'm glad games have become more about story than older games were, with increasing importance being placed on having a coherent narrative. Gameplay is still important, but we're not captivated by the gameplay loop or high scores anymore. And frankly, after living through Donkey Kong and Pac-man I can say I'd rather play the Witcher and Watch_Dogs than Mario Bros or Galaga.

You mean like a digital arcade which charges the same prices from back then per play/continue? If it was up front about the charges and an average player could get a decent amount of play out of each attempt, then i'd be ok with such a system.I like both...sometimes I want a story and long involved gameplay, and other times I want a short arcade style game.
(and sometimes I like a mix of both, such as more modern hidden object type games and others)

Well, today I watched both that damage less run of Ninja Gaiden 1 and a speed run of Double Dragon 2, both NES versions. Both under 20 mins, DD2, in particular, under 12 min.

And that's the thing, old games were short on content and hard as hell to compensate. Extra lives were a way to help you keep progressing a bit more.

Recently, Doom Eternal implemented an extra lives mechanic to help mitigate its difficulty. When it was released, I saw some reviewers criticize how easy it was to lose lives in dumb ways and, when you're finally back to a check point, you don't get your lives back, making going further harder anyway. I've been playing the game (in somewhat short bursts) since I got it as a Christmas gift and was feeling pretty much the same.

Except that now, I just realized that when you revisit past missions, you can get all available lives again. So you can farm them indefinitely. It's as easy as just restarting level 2 over and over and getting that extra life there.

So you can literally just break the challenge completely if you want.

When it comes to Ninja Gaiden games, I prefer pacifist runs to no damage runs. In fact, I find that it takes away from the game when the player doesn't get hit at all, and I don't find such runs entertaining; in particular, there's none of the health management that goes into pacifist or unrestricted speedruns.

The game I'm playing now, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, has a Classic Mode that plays like older games; it's been beaten in under 11 minutes, I believe. It has nearly everything you'd expect in a Classicvania, including limited lives, only carrying one sub-weapon at a time, and of course enemies that will knock you into bottomless pits. (Note that Classic Mode is so different from the main game that it's best to think of it as an entirely different game rather than a mode of the main game; on the other hand, 1986 mode can be best thought of an alternate mode of the Classic Mode game.) With that said, this mode does allow you to continue playing after a game over, but you go back to the beginning of the level (losing any mid-level checkpoints), and your score (remember that mechanic?) gets reset.

Blaster Master for the NES had limited lives and continues, so you had to make the most of them.
Blaster Master Zero 1&2 did away with them.

Part of the appeal of owning the SNES/Sega Genesis was that you could own cartridges of arcade ports.

I don't miss limited lives and continues.

Isn't this a remnant from the time of arcade machines when game over meant you had to spend more money to continue? I'm all for getting rid of annoyances for the player.

I remember, but not fondly...