The Completist
The End: A Brief History of Video Game Endings
Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow,
That I shall say good night till it be morrow.
The end is bittersweet, especially when it’s something you love, but alas, there is no escaping the eventual conclusion to all things. If you look at the humble beginnings of video games however, you may notice an interesting tendency. In the early days, most, if not all games had no predefined ending. Other than the “game over” screen, the player would generally spend their time chasing a high score in a loop ad infinitum. You could argue that a game over screen is an ending in of itself, but have a computer play Pong “perfectly” and the game could technically go on until our sun goes supernova. Pong, or Space Invaders, or Spacewar, or pretty much every game pre 1980 were not designed to be “beaten,” but simply played, products of limited resources in an antiquated era.
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