"Game over" is a message in video games which signals to the player that the game and an attempt of playing the level has ended. It is usually received negatively in a situation where continued play is disallowed, such as losing all of one's lives or failing a critical objective. However, it sometimes also appears after the successful completion of a game, usually ones designed for arcades. The phrase has since been turned into quasi-slang, usually describing an event that will cause significant harm, injury, bad luck, or even death to a person. History The phrase was used as early as 1950 in devices such as electro-mechanical pinball machines, which would light up the phrase with a lamp (lightbulb). Before the advent of home consoles and personal computing, arcades were the predominant platform for playing games, which required users to deposit a token or coin into an arcade game machine to play. Most early arcade video games typically had the game end when a timer ran out, with shoot 'em up game Space Invaders (1978) later popularizing a game over triggered by the player getting killed by enemies (either by being shot or enemies reaching the player), with the player given a finite number of lives before the game ends. During the golden age of arcade video games, players would usually be given a finite number of lives (or attempts) to progress through the game, the exhaustion of which would usually result in the display of the message "Game over" indicating that the game had ended. The phrase might also be followed by the message "Play Again?" and a prompt asking the player to insert additional tokens to prevent the game from terminating and instead allowing the player to continue their progress. The message can also be seen flashing on certain arcade games while in attract mode, until a player inserts a credit; at this point the message would change to the number of credits inserted and "Press 1 or 2 player start", or some variation thereof. As these games were ported to home consoles, the "Game over" screen and "Continue?" prompt remained, but often required only the press of a button to keep the game going; while the video game industry shifted away from being arcade-focused to being home gaming-focused, the inclusion of such a screen was no longer as critical since it offered no financial benefit. However, the