Mechanic · structure & scoring

Score

Points the game awards for actions, kept as a running total that players compare.

stubAlso: points, scoring, score system, point valuesUpdated 2026-10-23

A score turns play into a number. Games award points for defeats, items, and finishing quickly, and many raise the award for several in a row. The high score keeps the best total.

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Mentioned in

Games

Every claim about this mechanic, by game (1)
Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels 1986The status bar numbers, game setup, lives and game over (PrintStatusBarNumbers through RunGameOver) are Super Mario Bros.'s with a new GameOverSubs dispatch among them and these changes: the status bar's digit tables lose the second player's entries; UpdateTopScore checks one score where Super Mario Bros. checks two; DigitsMathRoutine drops a compare with zero before its BEQ; DefaultSprOffsets loses the sprite 0 data; InitializeArea loads the player's physics (LoadPhysicsData) and sets the secondary hard mode flag from 4-4 on and in all of worlds A to D (HardWorldFlag), where Super Mario Bros. sets it from 5-3 on or once the primary hard mode flag is set; SecondaryGameSetup sets the name table and switches on the status bar's IRQ split, where Super Mario Bros. sets the second player's lives and switches on the sprite 0 check; InitializeMemory also spares $0100-$0108; PlayerLoseLife reads its own halfway pages and no longer swaps players; RunGameOver opens the continue-or-retry menu (or, in world 9, ends the game) where Super Mario Bros. ends the game on Start or when the screen timer runs out and then hands over to the other player if they have lives left. GetAreaMusic and Entrance_GameTimerSetup keep every instruction, though the level timer's digits moved from $07F8 to $07EC.Code