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Sure, these days have almost every game sporting the newfangled 3D, but way back when, everyone had to live with plain old 2D. 2D, or two dimensions, limit the game to scrolling backgrounds, but some games even now make use of this basic concept.
Games whose titles consist of a single word.
In many games there is a ranking system, the players with the highest point value are listed in a "high score" table.
It's arguably the one move that symbolizes the medium to those outside it. The ability to jump, be it onto a building, a platform, or a skull, is one of the all time most important abilities ever put in a video game.
Games released coinciding with new hardware.
Gravity is a physical phenomenon, specifically the mutual attraction between all objects in the universe. In a gaming setting, gravity determines the relationship between the player and the "ground," preventing the player or game objects from flying off into space, and hopefully acting in a predictable/realistic manner.
Games that can be played with a CGA monitor and graphics card. CGA, Color Graphics Adapter was the first generation of color graphics for the IBM PC.
A two-dimensional image or animation overlaid into a scene. The foundation of early 2D games, making up everything from props to the player-controlled character.
Game Over originally appeared in pinball machines, and later, arcade machines. When players lose at a game, it is game over.
These games are based off of established licenses, such as movies, comics, or TV shows. Examples are the James Bond 007 and Spider-Man franchises.
This concept is for games in which at least one of the main characters is male.
A level in which everything is displayed on-screen at once, with no scrolling, flip screen, or 3D movement. Many '80s games consist entirely of single-screen levels.
Never Ending Games is a self-explanatory concept in which a game is unbeatable and never ends, due either to the game having no true ending or because the game is not saved (or truly continued) after the last section of the game.
The concept of purchasing media and having it delivered over the internet. No physical representation of this content is given, and although the content resides on the user's hard drive they are typically granted a license to the product, rather than ownership of it.
The concept of lives in video games evolved to let the player get a second chance after failing once. The most recognizable symbol is the heart.
A situation where the player-controlled character loses their life immediately. The quickness of that demise is often a stark departure from the balance of power, and sometimes the rules, established by the developers during the rest of the game.
Porting is a term used when a game designed to run on one platform is converted to run on a different platform. Quality varies, though some titles are packaged with extras.
A heads-up display is a graphical overlay of vital information used in most modern games.
Homebrew software is a slang term for unofficial software and games for consoles and handhelds which don't generally support it, such as the Wii or Nintendo DS.
A game that uses a mixture of 2D & 3D techniques. Commonly used to describe the use of either 3D graphics restricted to a 2D perceptive, or 2D graphics used to fake the appearance of a 3D perceptive.
Ever since Pac-Man, games have had us navigating mazes.
Pixel art refers to digital images composed of visible pixels, drawn with individual pixel-level intent and precision.
The main line of distinction between victory or failure in video games, death is the process of a biological being ceasing to be alive.
Side-scrolling games present the world as viewed perpendicular to the direction the characters are facing on screen. With a heavy focus on lateral movement, objectives are often met by moving from one end of a stage to the other.
Vertical scrolling is when the screen scrolls along the y-axis. In a vertical scrolling game the player usually starts from the bottom of the screen and moves up. They are also almost always presented in a top-down perspective.
Video games that, for better or for worse, are based on an existing non-video game franchise. Usually drawn from movies, tie-in games have also been made about TV shows, novels, and even one-hit wonder pop bands.
The controversial practice of incorporating "access control technology" into digital media so as to limit what owners of that media can do with it, most commonly for the stated purpose of preventing piracy.
Climbing is a common tradition in games, particularly platformers. There is often a particular type of surface that can be climbed, and it has a recognizably different look than other surfaces in the game. Climbing ladders or stairs doesn't count.
Depending on the country, a song enters public domain after a certain number of years after release or after the death of the writer. In the United States, it is 95 years after release.
An online retro gaming streaming platform.
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