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Anonymous10/18/25, 21:19No.12109285
Why did score become irrelevant? As a kid did you ever care about score?
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Anon10/18/25, 21:25No.12109295
High score is for endless arcade games. It never made sense in something like SMB but developers kept adding it to games due to cultural inertia.
Wolfenstein 3D is another example of a very late game with a pointless high score system.
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Anon10/18/25, 21:30No.12109304
I literally couldn't care less, I just wanted to get to the end of the game and move on to the next one
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Anon10/18/25, 21:30No.12109305
Video games progressed beyond being merely a challenge of player's skill to being a structured narrative experience.
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Anon10/18/25, 21:42No.12109321
The only time I have ever cared about score is when playing shmups.
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Anon10/18/25, 21:50No.12109338
never paid any attention to it and i dont think hardly anyone did
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Anon10/18/25, 21:53No.12109346
It became irrelevant because it was boring and better systems became easy to implement quite early in the history of video gaming. Even something stupid and superficial like a special "congratulations you won" screen at the end of a game that you can only see if you do ESPECIALLY well is fundamentally superior to a score. If the reward for playing especially well in something interactive like an advanced secret stage you have to fight through, all the better. And designing some kind of special unlockable content like that, that only the very most skilled players will ever see, is pretty easy even on fairly primitive hardware. In many games it's trivial to come up with difficult challenges that NO human will ever achieve without cheating. There really isn't any need anymore for infinitely looping games that measure your progress simply by increasing a single number and letting you see how high the number has gotten. Not that those are bad, the old ones can be great and it's fine to make new ones, but there's no real need to.Of course the dark side of this is insufficiently interactive moviegames.As a kid, I NEVER cared about score. As an adult, I first began caring about it a bit in certain games that gave me extra lives for scoring high. Later, I learned to enjoy going for high scores in old arcade-style infinitely looping games. That is fun, if the game is good enough. But it's still just one boring number.My favorite substitute for a high score is creative achievement, as in a building game like Pontifex where you actually design something original that wins, instead of merely completing a pre-written story such as "Mario beats Bowser and saves the princess". I've made some really crazy functional artworks in games like that.
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Anon10/18/25, 22:09No.12109376
Score games were old shit before the Famicom had even reached its twilight years. As early as about 1988, really. But the seeds were planted around '86, were there were a bunch of big games (Zelda, DQ) that lacked real scores, and that paved the way for everything else. It's kinda hard to care about scores when home games can facilitate longer and more adventure-driven experiences than dedicated arcade machines
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Anon10/18/25, 22:11No.12109383
Only characters in the movies cared about scores in SMB games. These days, you could make a competitive scene out of scoring in Super Mario Bros, but you'd have to wait for the speedrunning scene to die down first.
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Anon10/18/25, 22:22No.12109398
Blame Kojima
He started the trend of 'movie as a game'
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Anon10/18/25, 22:38No.12109424
>as a kid did you ever care about score?
In certain contexts, where a high score can unlock things, yes, I did. Outside of that? No. Never...Unless it was on a cabinet in some public space.
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Anon10/18/25, 23:06No.12109460
Score was irrelevant in early console+arcade games because none of them have score systems worth a damn
When arcade games actually started getting good scoring systems, normalfags stopped caring or just credit fed, so no one learned how to make a good one
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Anon10/18/25, 23:18No.12109474
There was never a point
>games don't save high score when you turn it off, so any high score you get is DUDE TRUST ME unless you had a camera and took a picture of your screen (like how Nintendo Power would ask)
>was a home console so nobody else sees your high score unless you invite them into your house the same day you made that high score since the game won't save it
>games without a time limit and respawning enemies mean completely possible to just max out score by sitting in one place and killing easy enemies
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Anon10/18/25, 23:20No.12109476
No but I care about it now and most of the games I play in my downtime are for score
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Anon10/18/25, 23:44No.12109524
Scoring is Kino but the game need a timer to make it good
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Anon10/19/25, 00:06No.12109574
only time i care about score is when i need an extra life.
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Anon10/19/25, 00:08No.12109576
Score's dumb in many console games because it's often implemented wrong. SMB1's score system in particular is kind of retarded, as others have pointed out already.I love score in arcade games, though, it lets me track how good I've gotten and gives me a target to beat next time.
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Anon10/19/25, 01:59No.12109830
Because early games were extremely simple so just counting score was a way to gauge a player's prowess. As games got a little more complex, this remained valid for a time, primarily in arcade and arcade-like games, but eventually you go in a certain new direction and reach a point where it's simply redundant for what you're doing.That said, experience points, levels, and money can kind of be looked at as pseudo-score when it comes to RPGs.
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Anon10/19/25, 02:14No.12109862
I only ever cared because of extends, still have my notebook pages to keep track of how many points until the next extra life for each game
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Anon10/19/25, 02:20No.12109874
>As a kid did you ever care about score?
Nope.
I liked putting ASS in the highscore table of arcade games. I never played "for score" though, I just played to have fun and play as long as I could (and of course if there were certain things that gave more score I would do them because achieving that was fun, not because it would look better in the total).OP, do you think you'll ever come close to understanding what video games were like before you were born? Why are you physically incapable of just enjoying them on your own terms, without obsessing over begging to have history explained to you and posting an endless array of irrelevant garbage threads?
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Anon10/19/25, 02:21No.12109876
bro hit me up with the unlisted url to your next youtube retro game video essay
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Anon10/19/25, 02:39No.12109915
>Arcade games are "too arcade"
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Anon10/19/25, 03:34No.12110024
Scores aren't irrelevant. Some devs will figure out how to re-implement them in a way that's more appealing to new generations. It just takes time. But I know this will happen because a lot of gamers are interested in speedrunning, and in some games, no-hit runs. These are just ways to implement scoring systems in games that don't have them. The children yearn for the scores.
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Anon10/19/25, 03:47No.12110056
Never noticed the score, until I got a switch. As a kid it never registered.
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Anon10/19/25, 09:08No.12110485
nobody ever cared, there were there because the only experience/inspiration console devs had were from arcade games. It's also why the difficulty was often bullshit, it's not that they hated you but that's just what they knew from arcade games.
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Anon10/19/25, 09:25No.12110501
One petty and stupid thing i thought was dumb in SMW was that getting coins that were floating got you 0 points. Seeing numbers go up as you run through coins feels better.
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Anon10/19/25, 10:27No.12110557
>Why did score become irrelevant?
It's probably still a thing in any game with online leaderboards, but otherwise it was always a self-imposed challenge (think "no death" or "no hit" or "beat the game by only using X" challenges) and in many cases you don't really need a visual indication for such challenges.
>As a kid did you ever care about score?
No, and it's probably why I wasn't a big fan of Rayman 3 back in 2003 - the entire game is built around score system and it's not about collecting lums like in Rayman 2.
But as years went by I actually started to appreciate Rayman 3's score system because it added a lot of replayability to the game.
Like, you can casually achieve pretty impressive stuff just by chaining combos properly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaZX6dfhGK0
And if you want to go full exploit mode and abuse every tool at your disposal (beyond the stuff that would make chaining combos trivial, like infinite duration for combos) then you can achieve some truly impressive stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGFpXZZwAvQ
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Anon10/19/25, 11:04No.12110597
Kind of always irrelevant. Anyone who doesn't talk about how you only looked at scores with your friends when trading discs for 95 don't get it.
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Anon10/19/25, 11:16No.12110613
>nobody ever ca-
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Anon10/19/25, 11:31No.12110638
every person that doesn't like scorekeeping doesn't like objectivity
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Anon10/19/25, 13:24No.12110848
High scores rewarded the arcade players with extra lives and bragging rights. Home systems used high scores to award extra lives and achievements like trophies and other bragging rights.
Eventually games evolved beyond of that.
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Anon10/19/25, 13:51No.12110916
>As a kid did you ever care about score?
I tried to get into nintendo power on a few games I was really good at, you could take a picture of your high score and send it in. Never made the cut though.
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Anon10/19/25, 14:01No.12110935
Score games of the time often failed to provide meaning to the scores.
You wouldn't get rewards or acknowledgements for high scores, and they'd disappear when you turn the game off.
There was no benchmark to aim for in many games, including many with a default high score table that was designed to be emptied quickly.Fast completion often became the preferred metric for proficiency at a game, rather than wracking up the highest scores. In SMB1 specifically, it was trivial to achieve the maximum possible high score if you knew about the infinite 1-up trick and farmed lives and points, or even without that trick if you noticed there's a level where you could kick one koopa shell to knock over a bunch of enemies, get lots of point and extra lives, and take a death to repeat this process.
Games like Metroid also rewarded faster completion times, and item completion percentages became an alternative scoring system that eliminated hard to control variables like abusing respawns and enemy kill farming.Mega Man also started with a scoring system, but had bizarre choices like randomizing the points reward for defeating a boss when you select your stage, instead of awarding points based on your performance (e.g. fewer lives lost, more enemies defeated). Mega Man Zero would later implementing a ranking system with metrics like these, and is a highlight feature that encourages replayability effectively.Kid Icarus is notable for having a very meaningful score system.
By earning points through defeating enemies, you extend your life bar, get bargaining power at shops, enable the use of enchanted weapons, and factor into which ending you get. Your gameplay performance via some hidden metrics also determines whether or not gods bless you with additional strength (shown as 1-5 arrows with 4 upgrades possible).
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Anon10/19/25, 15:00No.12111043
The virgin high score
The chad kill screen
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Anon10/19/25, 17:23No.12111354
the only time I've cared about score was when me and my friend were playing the same game around the same time and we'd compare our scores
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Anon10/20/25, 00:46No.12112523
This game has a score system
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Anon10/20/25, 14:27No.12114119
I never consider it, personally.
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Anon10/20/25, 14:50No.12114143
>don't ever reach the end of the game
>still get hardcapped at 999999 by stage 9
Love scores when they reward the player with a 1up, more so in 1cc's, but by that point it's no longer the score but the resources it gives you what really matters
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Anon10/20/25, 17:53No.12114526
only when it mattered
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Anon10/20/25, 18:38No.12114637
>Why did score become irrelevant?
It never did, it just changed. I'd argue they're more relevant now than ever. Before we had the issue of communication, how to tell others that I'm good at this game if they can't see my score when I turn off the console? Well, nowadays multiplayer games have ranked modes that award you with things like badges and profile icons for reaching a certain Elo or rank. Single player games let you share achievements. People care about those and they're the modern score IMO.
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Anon10/20/25, 23:58No.12115292
Even as a kid, I could just intuitively tell when score is relevant and when it isn't, because you naturally find yourself caring or not. I guess you could say there's 3 categories: score that's completely irrelevant to your experience, score that's kind of like a gate, and score you actually care about as it's the whole point. I'll give an example for each. Super Mario World is an example where the score is completely irrelevant. I could not give a single fuck about my score, it's the furthest thing from my mind. Sonic Adventure 2 (Battle) is an example of a game where the score is like a gate. I'm conscious of the score only in as far that I get just enough for an A rank. After getting an A rank in any one mission, I wouldn't be interested in ever trying to get another A on that mission but with an even higher score. And finally, Crazy Taxi is an example of a game where score is the whole point. Every time I play Crazy Taxi, my goal is to try and earn more cash than I've earned before, and the cash is essentially the score.
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Anon10/21/25, 00:32No.12115375
I always thought score was odd in Sierra games. I guess it's to offer some semblance of replayability, but come on.