Lives and Continues

Player begins with a small stock of lives; each death spends one and returns them to a start point with the world partly reset. Exhausting the stock ends the game, at which point a continue may allow resumption, often with penalties or from an earlier position. Structure quietly defines a session's length and shape, since the real unit of play is not the level but the stock of remaining attempts.

Taito's Space Invaders in 1978 needed the arcade to work as a business, which means each session has to end and the ending has to feel like the player's own fault. Lives did both while softening a single mistake. Continues arrived as an explicit price on failure, which is where the tension in arcade design lives, because the knob that sets challenge also sets revenue per cabinet.

Consequences outlived the coin box. Home ports inherited a difficulty curve tuned to extract money, and games spent years unlearning it, replacing lives with checkpoints and eventually removing the counter altogether. Where it survives it is usually deliberate, as scarcity that gives a run stakes. Free-to-play then rediscovered the mechanism exactly, with an energy meter in place of lives and a purchase in place of a coin.