Which game first used hit points?

Q: Which game first used hit points?

Hit Points is first recorded in Rogue (1980). Hit points express a character's remaining capacity to absorb damage as a depleting number, so a blow reduces a pool instead of instantly ending the fight or the life.

Hit Points — origin, lineage and the 43 games that used it

Hit Points

Hit points express a character's remaining capacity to absorb damage as a depleting number, so a blow reduces a pool instead of instantly ending the fight or the life.

Introduced 1980 Origin Rogue Developer Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, Ken Arnold Direct forks 4 All descendants 8 Later adopters 43

Damage becomes arithmetic. Attacks subtract a value, healing adds one, zero means death, and nearly everything else in the design hangs off that single scalar: difficulty tuning, item pricing, monster placement, the pacing of a dungeon. Because the pool is just a number it can also be displayed as a bar, capped, regenerated, or grown with experience, and most combat systems since have been built by attaching further rules to it.

Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman and Ken Arnold gave Rogue hit points around 1980, inheriting them wholesale from tabletop role-playing rules that had circulated since the mid-1970s. Credit is properly shared: the idea predates the medium, and other early mainframe dungeon games used the same borrowed arithmetic. What Rogue contributed was pairing the pool with permadeath and randomly generated floors, where a shrinking number becomes a running judgement about how much further you dare go.

Quantifying survival turned combat into a negotiation rather than a coin flip, which is what made difficulty tunable at all. It also imported an odd model of injury, in which a character at one hit point fights exactly as well as one at full health, and it rewards attrition play that designers have fought ever since with stamina bars, wound states, armour layers and regeneration. Every alternative is still measured against it.