# Video Games: Extra Life at 10000 Points
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/video-games-extra-life-at-10000-points/1018738
**Category:** The Game Room
**Created:** [May 24, 2025, 3:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/video-games-extra-life-at-10000-points/1018738 "2025-05-24T03:49:26Z")
**Posts on this page:** 8
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Dr\_Paprika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr_Paprika)
#### Post date: [May 24, 2025, 3:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/video-games-extra-life-at-10000-points/1018738/1 "2025-05-24T03:49:26Z")
I’ve been playing some retro video games, sometimes old Atari ones. It is striking how many of them give the player “a bonus life” after 10000 points. Some of these games were arcade standbys. It occurred to me that weak players might feel better about a game if they got a bonus chance, and stronger players (those named AAA at the top of the coveted best players list) would need the bonus less. Still, many games offered a bonus at 10000 but not later on.
1. What was the first arcade game to offer a bonus life for reaching a specific score.
2. Why did 10000 points become the standard?
3. Is there a list of specific games which offers this? Was this mainly an Atari thing?
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### Author:  [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)
#### Post date: [May 24, 2025, 4:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/video-games-extra-life-at-10000-points/1018738/2 "2025-05-24T04:09:07Z")
I’d be surprised if this could be answered with any level of certainty.
10,000 just seems a nice, round, big number. They could do 10 points but that seems uninteresting. So, make it 10,000. Big enough to seem important but small enough to be achievable. (In the very earliest games there might have even been a memory limit on using bigger numbers.)
Did they use psychologists to get that number? Or just guess? I suspect they just guessed and/or worked within technical limitations of using even bigger numbers.
As for the other questions that seems an awful lot of research to do for a message board and even then I doubt anyone could be sure.
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### Author:  [@Skywatcher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skywatcher)
#### Post date: [May 24, 2025, 4:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/video-games-extra-life-at-10000-points/1018738/3 "2025-05-24T04:11:34Z")
[Krakout](https://www.mobygames.com/game/19415/krakout/) gives an extra life every 10K. Which are needed because there’s a “ball eater” enemy that eventually pops up on different levels; the higher the number of banked extra lives, the better chance of surviving to the next level.
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### Author:  [@Skywatcher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skywatcher)
#### Post date: [May 24, 2025, 4:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/video-games-extra-life-at-10000-points/1018738/4 "2025-05-24T04:21:54Z")
> [@Dr\_Paprika](#):
>
> What was the first arcade game to offer a bonus life for reaching a specific score.
That _might_ have been Pac-Man (1980).
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### Author:  [@What\_Exit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_Exit)
#### Post date: [May 24, 2025, 9:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/video-games-extra-life-at-10000-points/1018738/5 "2025-05-24T09:36:55Z")
Quite a few pinball machines used 10,000 or 100,000 as an extra life. So probably a carry over from those.
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### Author:  [@Tusculan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tusculan)
#### Post date: [May 24, 2025, 10:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/video-games-extra-life-at-10000-points/1018738/6 "2025-05-24T10:55:48Z")
Apparently Space Invaders already awarded an extra cannon at 1500 points. Given that this was one of the first arcade video games, it may well answer your first question.
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### Author:  [@DKW](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DKW)
#### Post date: [May 25, 2025, 4:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/video-games-extra-life-at-10000-points/1018738/7 "2025-05-25T04:37:36Z")
Would you be so kind as to provide a list? I don’t spend a lot of time playing vintage arcade games, and as far as I know, 10,000 points was _never_ any kind of standard. Capcom, for example, used the low/high/multiple of high model for most of its early games; 1942’s most generous setting gave extra lives 20,000, 80,000, and every multiple of 80,000 thereafter (there were also options for 20/100, 30/80, and 30/100). Konami was pretty much the same (10/50 for Time Pilot, 30/80 for Gyruss, 30/70 for Contra). Sega, the trailblazers, did whatever they wanted, whether 20/70/120/170 for Sega Ninja or 5 million per for Space Harrier.
So to answer your other question, I can’t provide a list, because this was near-ubiquitous industry practice. I’d argue that it was _more_ ubiquitous than three lives per credit, which was never universal and killed completely dead by around Double Dragon.
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### Author:  [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elmer_J.Fudd)
#### Post date: [May 25, 2025, 4:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/video-games-extra-life-at-10000-points/1018738/8 "2025-05-25T04:48:46Z")
> [@What\_Exit](#):
>
> Quite a few pinball machines used 10,000 or 100,000 as an extra life. So probably a carry over from those.
Do you mean an extra ball? That’s usually achieved by hitting a sequence of targets; not the score reel. An extra game is based on the final score, but I have never seen any kind of consistency among pinball machines (and I have played hundreds) as to a particular number of points. That’s a number set by the machine owner/operator.