Mechanic · structure & scoring

Ending

The sequence a game shows when the player finishes it, from a message to a cutscene and credits.

stubAlso: endings, credits, staff roll, multiple endings, game endUpdated 2026-10-23

An ending closes the game. It may be a screen of text or a scene with credits, and some games pick one of several endings by how the player finished.

See also

Games

Every claim about this mechanic, by game (2)
Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels 1986The castle victory sequence (VictoryMode through PrintVictoryMessages) is Super Mario Bros.'s with these changes: on world 8, which world D also uses, VictoryMode runs a second task list that loads the ending from disk; SetupVictoryMode also sets the world's bit in CompletedWorlds and queues the castle-clear music; PrintVictoryMessages loses Super Mario Bros.'s world 8 branch and its victory music, and gains EndCastleAward, which counts the remaining time into points. DrawTitleScreen, which sits in the middle, shrinks to a few instructions that queue a layout held in the program, where Super Mario Bros. copies it out of CHR ROM. PlayerVictoryWalk keeps every instruction; only its addresses and one branch's distance differ.Code
AlternateSoundEngine, the ending's sound engine in SM2DATA3, is a rewrite of Super Mario Bros.'s MusicHandler that keeps its note and length code: it has no event or area music buffers and no time-running-out handling, steps through a list of patterns with PatternNumber, reading each pattern's header from MusicHeaderData, has its own pause and silence code, and plays the ending's music on the disk system's wavetable channel as well as the square, triangle and noise channels, with its own waveform, envelope and modulation tables.Code