Mechanic · time & pacing

Pause

Stopping the game at the player's request, until they resume it.

stubAlso: pausing, pause screen, pause menuUpdated 2026-10-23

A pause stops a game’s clock while the console keeps running. Games choose what goes on during it, such as the music or a jingle, and when a pause is allowed.

See also

Games

Every claim about this mechanic, by game (1)
Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels 1986The Lost Levels' boot, NMI and pause code (Start through MoveAllSpritesOffscreen) is Super Mario Bros.'s with these changes: Start sets mirroring through the disk drive's control register, keeps WorldNumber across the reset and sets the BIOS's IRQ flag; the NMI arms the drive's timer IRQ to split the status bar from the level, where Super Mario Bros. waits for the sprite 0 hit, and its VRAM address table is one table of 31 words where Super Mario Bros. has low and high byte tables of 19; PauseRoutine allows a pause in game-mode task 4 instead of 3, the game mode's task list having gained a disk task at its head. SpriteShuffler and MoveAllSpritesOffscreen are byte for byte the same, and the operating-mode dispatch differs only in its addresses.Code