Chicken-o-meter.

you probably know what this is it's a health bar an energy meter or life gage whatever you call it they're everywhere an essential part of videogames and their language of design it's a simple elementary thing but they haven't been around forever back in the golden era of arcade games things are a bit simpler either you were alive or dead there was no in-between if you touch a ghost in pac-man or an alien laser and Space Invaders that was it life lost maybe game over however by the mid-1980s things became more forgiving in beat-em-ups like final fight and the earlier renegade you could take a few punches indicated by the now-familiar health bar at the top of the screen it's an easy way to convey player health bar charts aren't exactly uncommon nor are they particularly hard to implement even on basic hardware one of the earliest examples is probably Nintendo's 1983 arcade game punch-out which has a similar configuration to later fighting games like Street Fighter 2 it's more of a stamina bar than a vitality one but it works as you'd expect when it's empty it's a knockout but as we go further back the very concept of health starts to change and we begin to see what would be more accurately described as energy bars instead of just losing health when you get hit these examples continuously decayed acting more as a timer and given the popularity of spaceships and jetpacks they were sometimes labelled as fuel or air supplies such as in manic miner or lunar jet man 1979's Astro Fighter data reached spher stris as the earliest example I could find I'm not sure if fuel exactly fits the definition of a health bar but they are part of the same lineage and stretch back to the earliest days of the arcade just a year after space invaders so the humble health bar has an origin and only really became common from 1984 or so what's most interesting is that during these early years before the bar was codified as an absolute standard there were some alternatives sometimes health was displayed as a numerical value such as in dauntless or rogue this method of tracking here points can be traced to pen and paper games like D&D another style from the transitional era is two-stage health the most famous example being Mario and super mushrooms where you can power up and survive a hit without dying ghosts and goblins does something similar take a hit and you lose your armor take another in this state of undress and you're dead sometimes health meters would emulate an electrocardiogram such as in note of yes odd where its heartbeat indicator decreases in vigor as you sustain damage this style is in common but has been surprisingly persistent it turns up in later titles such as shadow of the Beast system shock and quite notably in Resident Evil there's another particular type of health meter that's a little unusual and kind of rare but it's definitely my favorite I call it the chicken orbiter now essentially it's just a fancy health bar but instead of being a boring rectangle instead it's a visual representation of your vitality the first game to feature one is attack attack by ultimate play the game the studio later known as rare your health is represented by the image of a roast chicken slowly decaying with time or when you take heads with each portion lost it reveals the bones which constitute the chicken flesh slowly to plena SHhhh until eventually you lose a life and the chicken resets it is quite frankly vulgar a bar would have sufficed but instead we get this colossal indicator that dominates the screen and no doubt takes up plenty of RAM I think they did it for two main reasons the first is the restricted size of the play field in order to keep screen updates snappy the action only occupies a portion of the screen giving the hut plenty of space to fill with vital info secondly I think ultimate was showing off Atika tank released in 1983 when even basic health bars weren't particularly common so having this ornate piece of poultry on-screen demonstrates that you don't have to forego fancy graphics in a game full of fast action essentially proof that you can both have your chicken and eat it anyway attic attack turned out to be a best-seller deservedly so as it was a great game and as game conventions were still quite malleable a few imitated this rather idiosyncratic feature a jar Marama has a pint of milk that represents your snooze power wake up by depleting it as you lose a life agent X has a particularly ornate HUD with each life lost you take another step closer to the grave and the president's brain slowly switches from thinking peace to war instead sweevo's world has a reactive face that starts off happy and gradually becomes increasingly worried before becoming a skull star pause can best be described as wily coyote and the roadrunner but in space and it features an authentic chicken ometer in all its glory it was a creative time games were often made by individuals there was little editorial oversight and we had some true weird games as a result some became classics many more have been entirely forgotten on rare occasions video games can even influence television and this was the case with a British children's show from 1987 called nightmare they were simplified D&D films with a blue screen but the health indicator they used is effectively a chicken ometer variant featuring a face that slowly decays first the Armagh peels away then flesh fragments revealing a skull as a player's condition became more and more perilous in the final moments all that remained were a pair of eyeballs it was grotesque it was brilliant by the end of the 1980s these 16-bit machines were just starting to gain traction and residual 8-bit influence meant the chicken ometer made the transition to the likes of the Amiga Ubisoft 1989 title sir Fred depicts playerhealth as a few apples in the lower part of the screen each represents a life and is eaten to the core when you take damage 1989's Batman movie tie-in as a portrait in the center of the hunt which represents your health and as your damaged that man is slowly replaced by the Joker robocop 2 is similar featuring a drinks camera gets progressively crushed sadly by the time of Street Fighter 2 almost everyone was familiar with conventional health bars and screen real estate was spotty precious to waste on anything so frivolous but there was one exception 3d and pseudo 3d games of the era have to strike a balance between frame rates and viewable area so often the action would be confined to a small portion of the screen with the release of dungeon master in 1987 role-playing games had started to make the transition to a first-person perspective however seeing the world through your character's eyes means you lose some sense of characterization so with games like eye of the beholder the logical addition of character portraits became the standard for dungeon crawling these were used to indicate character status to an extent at least the member of your party dies they're replaced by a skull there was another more action focused off a G series that made the transition to a first-person perspective around this time it was called catacomb it was essentially a gauntlet clone for the PC with a similar looking sequel called the catacomb the third in the series would be called catacomb 3d and like the other RPGs that made a similar leap the Hutt would feature a character portrait a portrait that slowly transitions to a sculpt as you take hits it's a chicken ometer I mean it's not a chicken but the idea remains the same [Music] so what's the big deal well catacomb 3d was developed by a company called its software shortly after they would bring out a game called Wolfenstein 3d the character portray remained except this time it was animated with the portrait becoming increasingly bloodied as you took damage the same feature in Jordan tomb quake 2 [Music] doom guy is the chicken amitis long-lost cousin it could have plumped for health bar it would have been the sensible choice but they didn't instead they drew eight different poses for five different stages of health plus a couple of extras and placed its center stage why because it was cool there's more to it than that I think the reason I like these odd examples is because they defy convention and when we see clone after clone it's nice to have something that dares to be different conventions exist for a reason and there's a danger the breaking the bleeds only to gimmickry but what innovation came without a touch of bravery so here's to the chicken ometer and neat evolutionary offshoot a rejection of convention and quite frankly a bit of an oddball thanks for watching and until next time farewell

Channel: Ahoy

Views: 831,437

Rating: 4.9719868 out of 5

Keywords: xboxahoy, chicken, chicken-o-meter, health bar, life meter, energy gauge, health in games, knightmare, doom, atic atac

Id: B8HT8aUb5q4

Length: 11min 10sec (670 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 08 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/megaapple]

I'm absolute in awe with how Ahoy edits the UI that works with the theme of the video. It's brilliant.

Really glad he talked about Dungeon Master/Eye of the Beholder, the characters you make in the game reacting to damage taken and stuff. I played EoB in 2016/17, and I was still impressed by the little touches devs put.

Another small example to the video would be the old Commandos games, where the portraits reacted to damage taken and turn to skull when killed.

[u/Sarmathal]

Two Ahoy videos in the span of one month? What's going on?

[u/johnchapel]

I wish he explained Dead Space and Trespasser at the end there because I thought they both had really interesting non intrusive ways of communicating health.

[u/GlancingArc]

Kind of different but I think that the sanity and health meters in amnesia fit this category, they aren't part of the hud however and is in a menu.

[u/Misiok]

Shame he did not mention the Wolverine game, the last one that was released on the last gen I think.

I think I remember there being a health bar, but your character also visibly got damaged and the less health you had, the less body you had, which Wolverine slowly regenerated as it made sense story wise as well.

It was really cool seeing your spine and chest bones visible and slowly regrowing muscle, fat and skin.

[u/M00glemuffins]

A new Ahoy so fast? This is amazing. one of my favorite video essayists. Really neat to see what led to the chicken-o-meter of Doomguy's face.

[u/[deleted]]

Missed quite a few good modern takes on this, Gears of War had huge success with their chicken-o-meter.

[u/RootbeerFlotilla]

The game Plaque Attack (1983) had two kinds of health bars. First, the number of teeth you had left to protect, and secondly the size of the toothpaste tube acted as a timer, shrinking as you run out of time.

[u/MartyMcFlergenheimer]

I guess the modern example is cosmetic damage, like how Batman's suit gets progressively more damaged throughout the Arkham games, or just blood from your character as you take more damage.