Old School Words Today's Gamers Won't Understand

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Video games have only been a major thing since the '80s. But since that time, the way we talk about them has changed drastically. Here are some old-school words and terms that younger, newer gamers probably never experienced, and will only hear about in whispered tales of the distant past.

Unlimited lives and checkpoint-continues haven't always been the norm. For a long time, games offered a set number of lives and continues, and if you croaked through them all, say hello to stage one. Again.

For the first few generations of video games, most titles gave you a set number of lives, usually three. If you lost them all, you might have been allowed to continue at the start of whatever stage you died in, but once you blew through all your continues, the game decided you were terrible at playing it, and punished you by sending you to the very beginning to try again. Some games were extra unforgiving, offering three lives and no continues, or sometimes only one measly life sans continues. It was a holdover from the arcade game days, when the primary goal was to tempt you into breaking up with your quarter collection. The easiest way to do that was to give you a minimum number of opportunities to win. If you didn't, then you either paid up to play some more, or went home to read a book.

In recent years, the game industry has finally gotten this way of thinking out of their system, and have no problems with gamers happily playing for hours and continually progressing toward their goal, no matter how awful they may be at the whole enterprise. After all, if they actually enjoy playing your $60 game, they might be inclined to pay another $60 for your next one.

Back in the day, when gamers had limited lives and maybe one continue to tide them over, finding a 1-Up was more welcome than a $100 bill on the sidewalk. Anytime you got that extra chance to win and not get sent back to the beginning for once, you would take it.

In many early arcade games, you earned extra lives by scoring more and more points. Later games, like Super Mario Bros., tweaked that to award extra lives if you gathered enough coins (or some other nifty collectible) in each level. What's more, gamers started to find single objects that, if collected, would award them with extra lives. In Super Mario Bros, it was a green mushroom. In Mega Man, it was his own severed head, which wasn't creepy in the least. Whatever the game made the 1-Up look like, it made the player's day when they appeared.

Nowadays, you don't really need 1-Ups, as most games just let you keep playing until you win or rage-quit. Even games that do award extra lives are often designed so you don't truly need them, what with autosaves that kick in every few minutes and make it so you never have to revisit stage one unless you really want to.

With few exceptions, most cheat codes were inserted into the games by the developers themselves. For any games developers "forgot" to enhance, old-school gamers turned to a funky little miracle worker called the Game Genie.

Released by the company Galoob for the NES, SNES, Genesis, Gameboy, and Game Gear, the Game Genie was a device you attached to whatever game you were playing, and then inserted into the console. You would then input codes that basically hacked the game and gave you all sorts of goodies. You could have infinite lives, infinite continues, infinite energy, unlimited ammo, super strength, or just jump to any level you desired. Alternately, some codes let you make the game harder, by giving you less energy, fewer lives, or making the enemies stronger. Either way, the game was now yours to mess with.

Some companies hated that, such as Nintendo, who tried to sue Galoob over the Genie. They ultimately failed, as the judge decided that using the Genie did not "create a derivative work," ergo Mario and company just had to eat it and smile. They eventually beat the Genie by making games that didn't require endless codes to actually win, but Galoob was there when gamers needed them the most, and for that we're forever thankful.

Another problem with cartridges was that, sometimes, they wouldn't work quite right due to dirt and dust gathering inside. Most every old-school gamer knew the solution, however: blow into the cartridge and make the dust go away. They knew this thanks to the most bulletproof of scientific sources: their older sibling told them a kid did it and it totally worked.

The thing is, blowing actually did work! Sometimes! In reality, it was actually a crapshoot whether it would get the game going or not, but for some reason, many gamers would ignore the times it didn't work and focus on the few times it did. And so, the cart-blowing solution remained the preferred operation for frustrated gamers everywhere. But do you know why it only sometimes worked? Because it actually didn't work at all, and your sibling's friend was a big dumb liar the whole time.

In 2014, PBS Digital Studios released a video examining the cart-blowing phenomenon, concluding that the act of blowing was nothing but a placebo. In fact, it might have actually made problems worse: Nintendo itself warned against blowing into cartridges, saying it "can corrode and contaminate the pin connectors." So what does work? The simple act of taking the game out of the system then putting it back in. The simplest solution was the right one all along, and we could've saved our breath for huffing and puffing after Mario died for the 900th time that day.

For the longest time, controllers had no vibration — if you wanted a good shake every time your character got hit, you had to do it yourself. But that all changed with the Rumble Pak, perhaps the biggest game-changer in Nintendo 64 history not named Super Mario 64.

The name–bad spelling aside–describes the product perfectly: it was a pack that rumbled, which you attached to the back of the N64 controller. Once powered on, it would react to certain events in your game by vibrating, which made the player truly feel like they were part of the game. If they were playing Star Fox and some jerkhole of an enemy shot at your ship, you'd feel the shakes just as much as poor Fox McCloud did. Outside of wearing big, goofy VR goggles, the Rumble Pak might have been the ultimate in gaming immersion.

So why do you never hear about Rumble Paks anymore? It didn't go out of style — rather, it became so in-style that virtually every post-N64 system made rumbling a built-in feature. Today, controller vibration is as commonplace as analog sticks and crumbs of food stuck in the D-pad grooves. The N64 didn't do everything right, but getting us ready to rumble was a solid A+ with extra credit.

Today, the idea that a game would crash if you progressed too far would be grounds for a boycott. But in the early arcade days, it was the norm to encounter an unbeatable final boss in the form of the game you just paid money to play.

Famously seen in Pac-Man and Donkey Kong — endless games that simply repeated levels until the player died, ran out of quarters, or got bored — the kill screen would occur when a player triggered an "integer overflow." This is where a certain value in the game would run higher than the game's allotted memory. In 8-bit games like Pac and Kong, there was only enough room for 255 values per bit of data, so if a player exceeded that value somehow (by reaching Level 256 in Pac-Man, and by Donkey Kong's bonus calculator reaching 260 after Screen 117), they'd encounter the dreaded kill screen. In Pac-Man, the level completely glitches and fills itself with useless data the poor yellow dot can't possibly navigate. In Donkey Kong, the bug triggers an eight-second time limit guaranteed to kill Mario every time. If Bowser had thought of that, he could've married Peach decades ago.

We don't see kill screens anymore, since games have so much memory. To trigger one, you'd presumably need to reach Level 14 Centillion. But even then, since the game will likely have a final level, as virtually all games do today, it would end before any evil integers force it to.