You probably know what this is.
It's a health bar:
an energy meter;
or life gauge.
Whatever you call it, they're everywhere.
An essential part of video games, and their language of design.
It's a simple, elementary thing...
...but they haven't been around forever.
Back in the golden era of arcade games, things were a bit simpler: either you were alive,
or dead - there was no in-between.
If you touch a ghost in Pac-Man or an alien laser in Space Invaders, that was it - life
lost, maybe game over.
However, by the mid 1980s - things became more forgiving.
In Beat 'em ups like Final Fight and the earlier Renegade you could take a few punches - indicated
by the now-familiar health bar at the top of the screen.
It's an easy way to convey player health - bar charts aren't exactly uncommon, nor are they
particularly hard to implement, even on basic hardware.
One of the earliest examples is probably Nintendo's 1983 arcade game Punch Out!! - which has a
similar configuration to later fighting games like Street Fighter II.
It's more of a stamina bar than a vitality one, but it works as you'd expect - when it's
empty, it's a knockout.
But as we go further back the very concept of health starts to change - and we begin
to see what would be more accurately described as 'energy bars'.
Instead of just losing health when you get hit, these examples continuously decayed - acting
more as a timer.
And, given the popularity of space ships and jet packs, they were sometimes labelled as
'fuel' or 'air' supplies, such as in Manic Miner or Lunar Jetman.
1979's Astro Fighter - Data East's first release - is the earliest example I could find.
I'm not sure if fuel exactly fits the definition of a health bar, but they are part of the
same lineage, and stretch back to the earliest days of the Arcade - just a year after Space
Invaders.
So the humble health bar has an origin, and only really became common from 1984 or so.
What's most interesting is that during these early years - before the bar was codified
as an absolute standard - there were some alternatives.
Sometimes, health was displayed as a numerical value - such as in Gauntlet, or Rogue - this
method of tracking hit points can be traced to pen and paper games like DnD.
Another style from the transitional era is two-stage health: the most famous example
being Mario and Super Mushrooms, where you can 'power up' and survive a hit without dying.
Ghosts and Goblins does something similar: take a hit and you lose your armour, take
another in a state of undress - and you're dead.
Sometimes, health meters would emulate an electrocardiogram - such as in 'Nodes of Yesod',
where its heartbeat indicator decreases in vigour as you sustain damage.
This style isn't common but has been surprisingly persistent: it turns up in later titles such
as Shadow of the Beast, System Shock - and quite notably in Resident Evil.
There's another particular type of health meter that's a little unusual - and kind of
rare - but it's definitely my favourite.
I call it the chicken-o-meter.
Now, essentially, it's just a fancy health bar - but instead of being a boring rectangle,
instead it's a visual representation of your vitality.
The first game to feature one is Atic Atac, by Ultimate Play The Game - the studio later
known as Rare.
Your health is represented by the image of a roast chicken - slowly decaying with time,
or when you take hits.
With each portion lost, it reveals the bones which constitute the chicken - flesh slowly
deplenished until eventually you lose a life, and the chicken resets.
It is, quite frankly, vulgar.
A bar would have sufficed, but instead we get this colossal indicator that dominates
the screen and no doubt takes up plenty of RAM.
I think they did it for two main reasons:
The first is the restricted size of the playfield.
In order to keep screen updates snappy, the action only occupies a portion of the screen
- giving the HUD plenty of space to fill with vital info.
Secondly, I think Ultimate were showing off.
Atic Atac released in 1983, when even basic health bars weren't particularly common - so
having this ornate piece of poultry on screen demonstrates that you don't have to forgo
fancy graphics in a game full of fast action.
Essentially, proof that you can both have your chicken and eat it.
Anyway, Atic Atac turned out to be a best seller - deservedly so, as it was a great
game - and as game conventions were still quite malleable, a few imitated this rather
idiosyncratic feature.
Pyjamarama has a pint of milk that represents your 'snooze power' - wake up by depleting
it and you lose a life.
Agent X has a particularly ornate HUD - with each life lost, you take another step closer
to the grave: and the president's brain slowly switches from thinking 'peace' to 'war' instead.
Sweevo's World has a reactive face that starts off happy and gradually becomes increasingly
worried - before becoming a skull.
Star Paws can best be described as 'Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner' - but in space,
and it features an authentic chicken-o-meter in all its glory.
It was a creative time.
Games were often made by individuals: there was little editorial oversight; and we had
some truly weird games as a result.
Some became classics, many more have been entirely forgotten.
On rare occasions, video games can even influence television - and this was the case with a
British children's show from 1987 called Knightmare.
It was simplified D&D filmed with a bluescreen - but the health indicator they used is effectively
a chicken-o-meter variant, featuring a face that slowly decays.
First the armour peels away, then flesh fragments - revealing a skull as the player's condition
became more and more perilous.
In the final moments, all that remained were a pair of eyeballs.
It was grotesque.
It was brilliant!
By the end of the 80s, the 16-bit machines were just starting to gain traction - and
residual 8-bit influence meant the chicken-o-meter made the transition to the likes of the Amiga.
UbiSoft's 1989 title Sir Fred depicts player health as a few apples in the lower part of
the screen - each represents a life, and is eaten to the core when you take damage.
1989's Batman movie tie-in has a portrait in the centre of the HUD which represents
your health, and as you're damaged Batman is slowly replaced by the Joker.
Robocop 2 is similar, featuring a drinks can that gets progressively crushed.
Sadly, by the time of Street Fighter II, almost everyone was familiar with conventional health
bars, and screen real estate was far too precious to waste on anything so frivolous.
But there was one exception.
3D (and psuedo-3D) games of the era had to strike a balance between frame rate and viewable
area, so often the action would be confined to a small portion of the screen.
With the release of Dungeon Master in 1987, role playing games had started to make the
transition to a first-person perspective.
However, seeing the world through your character's eyes means you lose some sense of characterisation
- so with games like Eye of the Beholder, the logical addition of character portraits
became the standard for dungeon crawling.
These were used to indicate character status, to an extent at least - if a member of your
party dies they're replaced by a skull.
There was another, more action focused, RPG series that made the transition to a first-person
perspective around this time.
It was called Catacomb.
It was essentially a Gauntlet clone for the PC - with a similar-looking sequel, called
'The Catacomb'.
The third in the series would be called Catacomb 3-D, and like the other RPGs that made a similar
leap, the HUD would feature a character portrait - a portrait that slowly transitions to a
skull as you take hits.
It's a chicken-o-meter!
I mean, it's not a chicken - but the idea remains the same.
So, what's the big deal?
Well, Catacomb 3-D was developed by a company called Id Software.
Shortly after, they would bring out a game called Wolfenstein 3D.
The character portrait remained, except this time it was animated - with the portrait becoming
increasingly bloodied as you took damage.
The same feature endured in Doom.
Quake, too.
Doomguy is the chicken-o-meter's long-lost cousin.
Id could have plumped for a health bar - it would have been the sensible choice.
But they didn't!
Instead, they drew eight different poses for five different stages of health (plus a couple
of extras) - and placed it centre stage.
Why?
Because it was cool.
There's more to it than that, though - I think the reason I like these odd examples is because
they defy convention, and when we see clone after clone it's nice to have something that
dares to be different.
Conventions exist for a reason, and there's a danger that breaking them leads only to
gimmickry - but what innovation came without a touch of bravery?
So here's to the chicken-o-meter:
a neat evolutionary offshoot;
a rejection of convention;
and, quite frankly, a bit of an oddball.
Thanks for watching - and until next time, farewell.