Jenna: Game Over or death screens can be the most iconic part of a game because, well,
they’re parts we have to see a lot. Some of them even become memes in their own right.
Metal Gear Solid audio: Snake, are you okay? Snake? SNAAAKE??
Jenna: But they’re also a weird part of video game UIs. You watch your little digital
avatar collapse in a heap or quit your paper route or get jumpscared to death, and you
know they’re suffering the consequences of your bad game playing.
On the most basic level, a Game Over screen tells you that you messed up. They’re meant
to be frustrating! So how do you go about designing a piece of UI that players always,
instinctively hate to see?
Well, there are a couple different strategies. There’s the straightforward, functional
Game Over screen; the one that’s turned “aww, I died” into the common parlance
for when you reach the fail state. It’s the familiar bounce and drop, symbolizes Mario’s
descent into hell to atone for his many sins.
Other games use the death screen to correct this idea that you “died” - you’re not
dying when you fail, you just faint! Or maybe the devs make the Game Over screen so cute,
it’s hard to get angry at. Kirby might be the only game that kinda makes me feel a little
bit bad for wanting to continue to play.
I mean, Kirby’s all tuckered out, you know, let him sleep!
These games don’t want you to feel the anguish of losing, because gritting your teeth through
the pain isn’t really the point.
Other games really want you to feel that pain.
They make it a point to show you the worst, world-ending consequences of your actions.
This is what happens if you give up. Is that what you want?
They’re also often very ominous, which I love.
(Majora’s Mask audio of a really creepy echoing chuckle)
Jenna: Sometimes that elaborateness can work against the game.
Campy horror game Night Trap showed long FMV movies when you failed to keep the household safe.
It was specifically these sequences that landed the game in the 1993 Senate hearings about violent video games.
But the clip they show in the hearing cuts off before the end of the sequence, so they
didn’t get to see the player being scolded.
Night Trap audio: I put the lives of those girls in your hands and you screwed up! I’m
pulling the plug on you before you do any more damage.
Jenna: You aren’t supposed to want to see this sequence because if you did, it means
you fucked up and had to restart the whole game. And later in those hearings, the CEO
of Night Trap developer Digital Pictures actually used that fact to vindicate the game.
Senator Dorgan: is displayed... only when the game player loses.
Jenna: A lot of games know roughly when a player is going to die, and they can take
that opportunity and turn it into a punchline.
The infamous You Died screen in Dark Souls is so stark and simple, it really jabs you when you do something foolish.
But in a funny way? You laugh at it later.
The first time I died in Death’s Door, I was startled into
laughing at the BIG BOLD Game Over screen.
There it is, man. DEATH.
(wistful Sound of Silence-esque music)
Isometric fuckboi simulator Hades sneaks in some fun messages
to give you a little something for your efforts.
I honestly love knowing that the crowned prince of hell died because
he stepped on a rake. He’s so relatable.
Or the joke endings of Nier Automata. Genuinely few Game Over screens will stick with me as
much as the one I got when a character named Jackass told me to eat a mackerel, for science.
Don’t blame me if you die, she says! I thought, no, surely not.
Yes, I did rage quit that day, but it was also one of the funniest experiences I’ve
had in a game.
Some games know you’re going to see their Game Over screen a lot.
In fact, they’re counting on it!
These games demand that you fuck around and find out, because that’s the only way to discover how to make progress.
And you can see that in the design of the death screen.
Dark Souls and Bloodborne linger a long time on your final repose, making it easy to see
your aggressor — and figure out exactly where you were backstabbed from. Cuphead shows
you a graph of how far along you got on your run, which can be helpful for morale, but
also lets you know how many boss phases you have yet to encounter.
Although these games are too tsundere to admit it, this is really just a more subtle versions
of death screens that give you a little hint. Batman: Arkham Asylum is NOT a fuck around
and find out game; you should generally know, going into a battle, the best way to defeat
the massive pool of enemies. So it makes sense that the developers include hints on the Game
Over screens; they don’t want you mashing your face against the same obstacle over and over again.
I mean, you’re Batman, for god’s sake!
Shadow of Mordor also gives your murderer a chance to gloat, but that’s actually important
gameplay information. In the game’s Nemesis system, whoever successfully cleaves your
bod gains rank in the Uruk army. They already beat you up, and now they’ll be even more
powerful when you inevitably deal with them later. This Game Over screen lets you know
exactly who’s coming for your lunch money.
Of course, a Game Over screen with utility is nothing new. The earliest arcade games
were all permadeath - you pay your quarter and play until you die, simple. In 1979, Atari
released Lunar Lander, the first game to give players the option to continue playing, if
they have the spare change. Suddenly the Game Over screen could be an advertisement to keep
players pumping in quarters. A simple countdown was enough for a lot of games, but others
really wanted to incentivize you to continue.
And for the earliest home consoles, the Game Over screen was the only way to actually save
your progress. We 21st century gamers take for granted the ability to save our games.
We even exploit it as a legitimate gameplay strategy! But there was a time when it was
too expensive to pack cartridges with the 8 bits or whatever of storage you'd need to record
a player’s progress. So saving just didn’t exist.
But developers still wanted players to be able to progress in their games. So they programmed
in bookmarks, of a sort. Like in Metroid, when you died and got a Game Over screen,
you were given a password that let you start at whatever level you left off at. As long
as you had that password, you could hop in at that level. You never had to worry about
your kid brother accidentally overwriting your game.
Some Game Over screens take the sting out of losing, by being confusing.
Sega Rally Championship audio: Game Over yeah! A long keytar cord, ending with a jaunty cymbal.
Jenna: And some games go meta with it. Undertale and Five Nights at Freddy’s both have game
overs that actually crash your game. That’s the most game over you can get! Other meta
screens just gently acknowledge that you’re in a game. Most of Fallout 2’s game overs
are played straight, but there’s a small chance you’ll hear Ron Perlman tell it like it is.
Fallout 2 audio: Hope you saved your game. Cause you’re dead.
Jenna: I really like the meta Game Over screens because they’re kind of acknowledging how
weird death screens are. A death screen shows you that you have not yet finished the story,
because you have not yet mastered the mechanics. And it tells you that you, the player, have
failed by showing that you, the character in the game, are being punished.
Dying is an important part of games, so much so that some genres are defined by how often
you die. If you got to Gwyn, Lord of Cinder without once seeing “YOU DIED,” you’d
probably have a hard time understanding what all the fuss was about.
Balancing a game’s difficulty is a whole other field of game development, but game
over screens are the most stark, straightforward way of telling a player where they stand.
Rarely do we get such clear feedback about our performances. It’s like, Game Over screens,
and that moment when you pet the wrong part of a cat and it latches down on your hand.
That’s pretty clean cut. But for the most part, our failures are really watery.
So it’s comforting to play in a space where you can truly experiment. To know that there’s
a definitive goal, and to know when you haven’t quite reached it yet. To have the opportunity
to try as many times as you want, until you succeed or just can’t deal with it any more.
Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar that
“Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once.”
But everybody knows Shakespeare was a casul.
I prefer modern philosopher Jake the Dog, who postulates that:
It can be hard not to think of a Game Over screens as a sign of failure. Instead, we
should be thinking of them as the first sign of victory.
Dark Souls death audio
Jenna: ...by being confusing. Game over, yeaaaah!
I legitimately have just like been whispering that to myself, ever since I heard it.