History
The first games containing a bonus stage are widely believed to be Namco's Rally-X (1980) and Galaga (1981). In the latter, the level would begin with the text "Challenging Stage" and would feature enemies that do not attack. The player is then rewarded extra points based on how many enemies could be eliminated.
Since few modern games use points as an incentive for gameplay, most modern bonus stages reward the player with power-ups rather than points. Modern games have often blurred the traditional distinction between bonus stages and ordinary levels. Most first-person shooter games allow players to enter bonus rooms within larger (non-bonus) levels to temporarily power up. Some games have optional bonus stages which must be discovered and whose completion impacts the mechanics of the rest of the game, as in the "Star Road" levels of Super Mario World. There are bonus levels in most Crash Bandicoot games, save for Crash Twinsanity and Crash of the Titans.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“When the coherence of the parts of a stone, or even that composition of parts which renders it extended; when these familiar objects, I say, are so inexplicable, and contain circumstances so repugnant and contradictory; with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds, or trace their history from eternity to eternity?”
—David Hume (1711–1776)