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4[[quoteright:349:[[VideoGame/NewSuperMarioBrosU https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/mario1up.png]]]]
5[[caption-width-right:349:Repeat until bored and/or out of time.]]
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7[[OneUp 1-Ups]] are a good thing in many games; with a limited number of VideoGameLives, you'll need some extras just in case if you want to get through the game in one sitting. Some game designers, however, don't know when to quit giving you opportunities to earn them, and create an Infinite 1-Ups, an incredibly easy (if sometimes tricky) way of gaining an infinite amount of life which makes the game far easier than it should be.
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9Typically, this'll be some sort of GuideDangIt infinite loop combo that would rack up extra lives like crazy, but Infinite 1-Ups can be used to describe ''any'' instance where you're able to gather an insane number of extra lives, through gimmicks or no. This trope can cause the game to have MeaninglessLives. On the other hand, a really NintendoHard game can eat through even the lives gained by this, since the life counter is going to reach a {{Cap}} sooner or later.
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11See also BraggingRightsReward, which Infinite 1-Ups is if performing it is harder than surviving anything in the game.
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13This can happen either by design (an EasterEgg or a reward for pulling off some challenge the game designer thought would be incredibly difficult), or by accident due to a GoodBadBug.
14
15----
16!!Examples:
17
18* ''Franchise/SuperMarioBros'':
19** ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBros1'': There's the infamous "Koopa Shell Bounce" (where you corner a Koopa Troopa Shell on a stair and continuously jump on it, keeping it stuck there while you rack up points and lives until you jump off and land on the ground; since each enemy you GoombaStomp without touching the ground gets you more points and eventually 1-ups, get the shell at just the right spot for you to endlessly bounce off of it and you're immortal! ''The Lost Levels'' lets you do this at the very beginning of the game!)[[note]][[NintendoHard and you'll need every last one]][[/note]], the "Koopa Shell Ricochet" (where you'll keep on earning lives from enemies a kicked Koopa Shell kills, as long as it doesn't stop or go off the screen, exploited heavily in areas where you can trap a shell in one screen between two blocks while Lakitu or another MookMaker can keep feeding foes to the grinder), the "Starman Rush"/"Demolition Mario" (essentially the same as the Koopa Shell Ricochet, except you use the power of a Starman instead of a shell to kill enemies), the "Goomba Stomp Chain" (the Koopa Shell Bounce done on multiple enemies and usually with the assistance of VideoGameFlight, again only stopping when you touch solid ground), and the "End Point Exploit" (only applicable in ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBros3'' and ''VideoGame/SuperMarioWorld'', where touching the goal while enemies are on the screen turns them into point-heavy coins). In the case of ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBros1'' and ''[[VideoGame/SuperMarioBrosTheLostLevels The Lost Levels]]'', though, you have to be very careful about how you use your Infinite 1-Ups, because the game features an unintentional form of NoFairCheating where getting more than 128 lives at once makes the life counter overflow into negatives, giving you an instant GameOver as soon as you die (or even clear the level!)
20** ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBros2'': The Game Boy Advance version changes the Turtle Shell behavior to be more like the classic Koopa Troopa shell. Where once it would disappear when it hit an obstacle, it will now bounce back (and will damage the player), and has the "each enemy hit by it gives more points until a certain point, after which each one gives you an extra life" mechanic. This creates a few "MookMaker equals 1-up factory" opportunities.
21** ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBros3'':
22*** It starts pretty early. With the Raccoon Tail letting you glide slowly to the ground, a pipe in the ''second'' course that endlessly spawns Goombas lets you rack up 1-ups until the clock runs out.
23*** A level allows you to turn all bricks into coins. Mario can gain about five extra lives before the clock runs out; repeating this level over and over can give you 100 lives in about an hour.
24*** There are several levels where enemies spawn infinitely and with just a little planning, you can queue up a bunch of free lives. World 3, Level 5 has a Lakitu that throws out Spinies, while several of the auto-scroll levels in World 8 have a number of cannons placed close to each other such that with a little practice, you can build up your score multiplier by jumping on cannonballs until the point bonuses turn into 1-Ups.
25** The Koopa Shell Bounce exploit is even shown in the 9-Volt/18-Volt character video in ''VideoGame/WarioWareSmoothMoves'', accompanied by three giant "1-UP"s.
26** ''VideoGame/SuperMarioWorld'':
27*** The game has hidden 3-Up moons, as well as two different hidden areas that you can use to acquire up to ''9'' lives. Also, there are fences in many of the castle and fortress stages that contain Koopas, and as long as you don't touch the ground, you can rack up plenty of lives simply by knocking them off. There's one castle that's almost ''entirely'' Koopa Troopas on fences, pretty much serving as a [[SuspiciousVideoGameGenerosity 1-up factory you'll want to make use of because the difficulty is about to go up a notch]].
28*** In the Sunken Ghost Ship, wait for a Bullet Bill, bop it and keep it afloat. Lather, rinse, repeat.
29*** In the water fortress level, there are Bony Beetle enemies can re-form after a certain amount of time like a Dry Bones. There is a hallway before a door with two of them where you can farm 1-ups by bouncing off them both, swimming to stay off the ground, then bouncing off of them again when they reform. Once again, Lather rinse repeat.
30*** The mid-game hidden stage "Vanilla Secret 2" allows you to run through a section with a ''lot'' of critters after using a silver P-Switch (which basically is the equivalent of the Starman Run, except the bonus goes up to ''3-Ups''.) Ending the sequence with at least 40 lives added is [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtE-1m6RHrQ well known.]] Also, Mario can respawn said silver P-Switch by eating it with a Yoshi as it is crushed, allowing expert players to get pretty much ''every single enemy'' in one go, which is hundreds upon hundreds of lives.
31*** The "Top Secret Area", above the Donut Ghost House has nothing but five question blocks with two fire flowers, two capes and one Yoshi, which if you have Yoshi, is an extra life. You can simply leave and come back, as many times as you want!
32*** The Donut Ghost House itself has four 1-Ups in the secret passage that unlocks the Top Secret Area. All you need is a cape, and going there takes less than a minute.
33*** In [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA5pO0xuaN0 Forest of Illusion 1,]] there is a set of platforms containing four Wigglers and three Koopas contained in blocks. By using Caped Mario and floating back and forth, bouncing off the Wigglers and Koopas, you can continually bounce between them for as long as you want (the Koopas and Wigglers reset their states offscreen). When you do it for long enough, the 3-ups you receive turn into incomprehensible symbols that give you Metric Butt-tons[[{{Tradesnark}} â„¢]] of [[ScoreMilking points and coins]]. Yeah, [[GoodBadBugs that last bit is a glitch]]. The bug was fixed in the [[VideoGameRemake Advance version]], but you can still gain a jillion lives there the normal way.
34*** As for the normal way: There's a powerup box that cycles between several different items, including the InvincibilityStar. Pick up the Starman, and then simply charge through the level running into every enemy you find (and there are a lot) to get a minimum of about 20 1-Ups. It gets better after you first complete it: this game lets you repeat any level, and also exit a level by pressing Start and Select with no penalty for doing so. And did we mention said box is ''right after the midway checkpoint?'' You can get the star, rack up the 1-ups, exit, re-enter to ''just before this sequence,'' and do it over and over and over.
35*** The most damning game breaker in nearly all the "Advance" games is the fact that the game saves your lives. Average players will likely max the counter out by mid-game. ''And the max is 999.''
36*** Also, the GBA version of ''Super Mario World'' grants points for simply hitting a Koopa shell with Mario's cape, and these hits can be used in chains, allowing [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGgq_p_0LAw this]] to happen. Wow.
37** The 1995 NES bootleg version gives you a 1-up for leaving Yoshi's house and you can enter the level as many times as you feel like. The game is Nintendo hard due to its poorly-cloned control scheme so you'll be visiting Yoshi's house often.
38** In ''VideoGame/NewSuperMarioBros'', the old stair-shell trick [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZNxs-NATU0 still works.]]
39*** Also Green Mushroom Houses may give very big number of lives in ''New Super Mario Bros'' if you're lucky (getting these isn't hard...)
40*** And getting the Mega Mushroom in 1-1 guarantees at least one (and quite easily, all five) lives in each play-through.
41** ''VideoGame/SuperMarioWorld2YoshisIsland'' makes it even easier, due to lacking a time limit, the fact that carrying a shell or Melon Bug doesn't reset the 1-Up counter, and ''many'' pipes that constantly spawn Shy Guys providing you don't have a full complement of eggs. The earliest example is found in level 1-7: Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy, where Yoshi can use a Melon Bug and a pipe spawning Shy Guys.
42** ''VideoGame/SuperMarioGalaxy'' practically lampshades this trope by having Peach mail you five 1-Ups every time you start the game, [[spoiler:or 20 in the NewGamePlus,]] as well as feeding you tons of the green mushrooms in every level which respawn when you die (and in the Hub World).
43*** ''VideoGame/SuperMarioGalaxy2'' goes back to tradition by allowing you to farm Koopas for 1-Ups. Go to Supermassive Galaxy, and head for the planetoid with the three giant Koopas. Jump onto the shell of one of them, and judge the control stick so you keep stomping on it. You'll hit 99 lives in less than a minute.
44*** Made easier if you use Co-star mode to immobilize the Koopa you're jumping on with the second control.
45** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1bsf05wtbQ#t=02m00s This tool-assisted speedrun]] of ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBros3'' turns certain ''entire levels'' into Infinite 1-Ups.
46** In the Japanese ''Super Mario Bros. 2'' (Lost Levels), you get a 1-Up if your coins are at a multiple of 11 that matches the last digit of your timer (e.g. 11 coins with 201 left on the timer). It's possible to do this in nearly ''every'' level of the game.
47** Amusingly, ''VideoGame/SuperPaperMario'' actually ''[[NoFairCheating punishes]]'' you for doing this in an area early in the game where the Koopa Shell Bounce staircase is replicated. Stomping the shell enough will cause you to ''lose'' points after a while.
48** ''VideoGame/NewSuperMarioBrosWii'' has "Infinite 1-Up" videos that can be purchased at the castle that will show you all kinds of tricks to get infinite lives. One method is to have one character start {{Goomba Stomp}}ing enemies, and then have another player use Yoshi to swallow him until you find some more enemies. Being swallowed by Yoshi does not count as touching the ground.
49*** An interesting instance can be found in between 6-6 and the World 6 Castle. Touching one of the Bullet Bills on the map sends you into a minigame where you have to collect eight Toad balloons to save Toad, and at the end, you get three Mushroom power-ups. Unlike most such minigames, this one can be done over and over. Furthermore, any enemies onscreen when the 8th balloon is collected are turned into points. And since the theme of the level is [[BulletHell Bullet Bills]]...that could easily be enough enemies to get 1-3 extra lives as well. And since each completion gets you three Mushroom power-ups, you should easily enter the level with an extra hit to give every time.
50** Because of ''VideoGame/NewSuperMarioBros2'''s emphasis on gaining coins, the entire game can turn into this, but by far the biggest example is World 2-4. There's an easily obtainable Gold Flower at the beginning of the level which, among other things, grants you coins instead of points for killing enemies. Later on there's an area that infinitely spawns Goombas. Jumping on them consecutively starts awarding a 1-up for every other enemy you kill (since the counter tops out at 50 coins per enemy killed). Since a skilled player can rack up around 9000 coins in a single playthrough of this level using this method, and 100 coins still nets you an extra life, you can do the math from here.
51** ''VideoGame/NewSuperLuigiU'' has "Larry's Trigger-Happy Castle", in which it is very easy to grind lives by jumping to Bullet Bills.
52** ''Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins'' has the Hippo level, which lets you easily get coins, lives, a mushroom or any powerup of your choice. The unnamed auto-scrolling extra stage, opposite the path to the Hippo, allows you to get a couple of 1-ups via the Starman rush. Also, there is a BettingMiniGame which randomly gives you up to 99 lives.
53** ''VideoGame/SuperMario64 DS'': In Whomp's Fortress, on any star except the first, if you acquire the Super Mushroom from the box near the first Thwomp and manage to get to the topmost portion of the fortress, you can knock the enormous plank-platform over so it lays flat on the ground. Proceed to run into the side, and after a moment the thing will start giving 1-Ups at an alarming rate. Because it is extremely difficult to get atop the fortress in your giant state, the usual number you'll end up with is probably in the 40s or 50s, but if you're really good you can quite efficiently max out the life counter at 99, with 1-Ups to spare.
54** ''VideoGame/SuperMario3DLand'' has a spot in World 1-2 with the old "bounce a Koopa shell into the wall" trick, but with a twist; you're bouncing the shell into the fourth wall. There are several other levels with Koopas and walls in the proper placement to do this trick, but World 1-2 is the easiest and the earliest; it's amusing to render lives [[MeaninglessLives entirely pointless]] not even two levels into the game.
55*** Also, when fighting Pom Pom, when she goes in her shell and hops around the room trying to stomp Mario, you can jump on her shell and bounce off repeatedly, gaining dozens of 1-ups in the process...
56** ''VideoGame/SuperMario3DWorld'' has the fastest way to earn extra lives in the series. You still need to bounce repeatedly on a Koopa shell, and you can do it in several levels, but World 1-2 has a particular spot where you can earn 1-ups so fast with this technique that you'll be able to earn Crown-Crown-Crown (1,110) lives and still have more than enough time to finish the level like normal, with the stars and stamps.
57** With its many GameMaker tools, ''VideoGame/SuperMarioMaker'' and [[VideoGame/SuperMarioMaker2 its sequel]] allows this in multiple ways (even to the point of having cannons straight-up shooting 1-Up Mushrooms!). Unfortunately, they really don't matter in this game, except in 100-Mario Challenges but you can never know what kind of level you will get. Your fate lays in the hands of the makers! However, both games only let you take three lives with you once you complete the level.
58** In the ''WebAnimation/NatrapsX'' series, the first DeathMontage shows VideoGame/{{Spelunker}} using the Koopa Shell Bounce trick before killing Rockman. The second has Rockman, reduced to one life, getting his revenge and some of his lives back by bouncing on Spelunker in the same way.
59* ''VideoGame/{{Fable}}'' has the Resurrection Phials, potions that revive you should you lose all your health. While there's no special task to getting them (and you can only carry nine Phials at a time), they are incredibly plentiful and fairly cheap to buy from stores and traveling merchants, effectively making you immortal as long as you have the cash to keep buying them (which is no problem, either).
60* ''VideoGame/DonkeyKongCountry'' has balloons. Red balloons give one extra life, green ones give two and blue ones give three. Collecting three identical animal tokens opens a special area where the player can get even more extra lives. A ''lot'' of lives; every 100 mini-tokens you gather in the special areas net you an extra life, and there's a mega-token there that, if collected, ''doubles'' the total amount of mini-tokens collected.
61** ''VideoGame/DonkeyKongCountry1''
62*** The first level, "Jungle Hijinxs", is short and extremely easy and contains tons of life balloons (in addition to the lives you get from bananas and animal tokens). It can be played as many times as you want before moving on to the rest of the game.
63*** The rope trick consists of getting on a rope in the stage "Misty Mines" and placing yourself next to the barrels that spawn enemies. From there you can jump on an enemy and then back to the vine without touching the ground. After doing it eight times, each consecutive time.
64*** The Krusha trick can be done in "Loopy Lights," "Manic Mincers," or "Millstone Mayhem" (the first ruins stage); play as Diddy Kong and bounce on a Krusha pinned up against the wall as many times as you want to get a ginormous amount of lives insanely quickly - as in, you will earn extra lives roughly ''three times faster than the life counter can display.'' You can easily reach 99 (and far beyond, though the life counter doesn't show it) in under 60 seconds.
65*** One of the recurring minigames tasked you with repeatedly stomping a Klaptrap (who spat out more bananas and moved faster after each hit). In one level this minigame featured ''three'' such Klaptraps, enabling the player to bounce between them continuously, accumulating many extra lives in the process.
66** ''VideoGame/DonkeyKongCountry2DiddysKongQuest''
67*** ''[=DKC2=]'' has Swanky's games, which give you 6 extra lives if you answer all the (pretty easy) questions correctly. Although it's not infinite, it's a huge boost.
68*** This game also gives you the ability to easily exit levels you have beaten before. The first level has a balloon one screen from the starting position, so once you've beaten it you can easily enter, get balloon, then exit in about 20 seconds. You can then just repeat until you get bored.
69*** And there's also "Barrel Bayou", where a little ways past halfway are two Kloaks (enemies who throw various things) that keep throwing easily defeated enemies for a while, and then throw a chest with a green balloon worth 2 lives before leaving. Given that enemies respawn if they are avoided but not killed, you can pass the Kloaks and them come back to them to repeat the process as much as you like.
70** ''VideoGame/DonkeyKongCountryReturns'' introduces a new gameplay mechanic: similarly to ''Mario'', jumping on several enemies consecutively eventually gives you 1-Ups. This becomes handy in "8-K: Five Monkey Trial". One of the trials consist of jumping on Squidlies in order to reach the top of the area, but the pattern of their arrival is fixed, and one knowing it could do a LeapOfFaith from one of the upper Squidlies with the help of Diddy's barrels and landing on one of the bottom Squidlies and repeat the process.
71* In various ''Franchise/SonicTheHedgehog'' games, some levels have more than one 1up monitor, which reset if you die. You can collect two extra lives, kill yourself, and repeat for as long as you want.
72** And of course you get a 1-up for collecting 100 rings, so you can double the rate of life grinding if you delay your suicide until you've found both monitors and collected 100 rings.
73** In the Launch Base Zone of ''[[VideoGame/Sonic3AndKnuckles Sonic 3]]'', there are alarms that send robotic birds to attack you when triggered. Standing in one to continuously trigger it and holding down for a [[RollingAttack Spin]] [[ChargedAttack Dash]] results in this. The birds will try to divebomb you, and break, with the amount of points you get for breaking each one increasing until you get 10,000 points for each. You get an extra life [[Every10000Points every 50,000 points]], resulting in another life every 10 seconds or so. Getting a Time Over removes one life and puts you at the starting point, right next to an alarm, so [[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill this can be done until you get bored or the game glitches out]]. Only the first 99 are saved when the game is turned off or completed, though, and it stops working [[{{Cap}} once your score maxes out]].
74** Final Rush in ''VideoGame/SonicAdventure2'', for instance, has three easy 1up opportunities in the first quarter of the stage.
75*** The key difference, though, is that extra lives don't respawn in ''Sonic Adventure 2'', or at least not in the Gamecube port. Choosing "restart" from the pause menu will make them respawn (again in any version), at the cost of undoing any checkpoints you may have hit. Since the lives are close to start, that's not likely to matter in this case.
76*** A GoodBadBug was discovered in another level that dwarfs any other source of 1-ups in the game, [[http://www.soniccenter.org/guides/sonic_adventure_2_b/guide321 potentially earning as many as 95 lives quickly]].
77** ''VideoGame/SonicAdventure'' also has this trope, this time in a HubLevel rather than an actual stage. It only works as Knuckles or Tails, but it is broken as all hell. Basically, you need to get a magnetic shield (by either digging as Knuckles, or cutting down grass as Tails), then stand on the switch in the hotel lobby. The switch will cause rings to appear, and can do so infinitely; the shield will pull those rings towards you, collecting them automatically. It may not be quick, but it is safe, and these rings carry over into the next level with the switch. If you are careful, you can get dozens of lives and thousands of rings via one use of this (rings are useful for Chao raising).
78** ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog4: Episode 1'' has [[CasinoPark Casino Street Zone]] Act 2 where one ups are very frequent.
79** ''VideoGame/SonicUnleashed'' provided two extra lives at the start of Apotos, Windmill Isle (Day) - Act 2. Combine that with the extra life you can get by collecting 100 rings (Which can be amassed not even 1 minute into the stage), grabbing these three and restarting will have you at a comfortable amount of lives in no time.
80*** You can also go into the hub worlds (the ones that house the actual levels), which always have some lives just laying around and a ton of rings. Enter, collect everything, leave, repeat.
81** Finishing the credits on ''VideoGame/SonicColors'' can grant about a half-dozen lives each time. Of course, the credits are rather long, and you'd have to have already beaten the game, but the lives are there. The same game gives anywhere from one to four lives just by finishing a stage, so getting lives isn't that hard.
82** The ''VideoGame/YoshisIsland'' DLC stage in the Wii U version of ''VideoGame/SonicLostWorld'' is a relatively easy stage and if you manage to collect every Yoshi Egg in the level and complete it can give you upwards of 30 lives each time. The Yoshi level locks for a little while after each completion of it, but there's also Windy Hill Act 1, which has an area after a checkpoint with many extra lives that only require some moderately precise jumping to get every time; then you can leap off the stage and repeat the process. Both of these farming opportunities are useful as the game is surprisingly stingy with extra lives generally.
83* In ''VideoGame/SlyCooperAndTheThieviusRaccoonus'', the first level hub has 1ups that reappear every time you enter it. You can keep exiting and reentering the stage to collect them ad infinitum.
84* ''VideoGame/NinjaGaiden II'' has a OneUp in a later stage that respawns, but ''only'' if you immediately climb back ''down'' to where you were before you entered the area with the OneUp, then climbed back up; moving past it and climbing up to the next screen negates this.
85** The first ''VideoGame/NinjaGaiden'' has one in 5-3, with the same rule. The PC-Engine port of the game, however, removes it. The Super NES port does not.
86* In ''VideoGame/CrashBandicoot2CortexStrikesBack'', in the second hub (ice theme), the player can jump on a polar bear in front of one of the level warps in order to make it cry. [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential Doing so ''repeatedly'' will give you several lives]].
87** In the same game, the [[spoiler: secret area in Level 15, right after the checkpoint, has two one-up crates that don't turn into question mark crates after they respawn - they're just out of sight unless the camera is just right]].
88** In the second level that features bees, when being chased by swarms, sliding into them and spinning at the right moment will give you a 1-up. This can be done as many times as you like, since the bees respawn infinitely. It's a little tricky to pull off, but rewards greatly when you do.
89** While not a trick, ''VideoGame/CrashBandicootTheWrathOfCortex'' has "Bamboozled", which can only be described as a "life level" akin to Jungle Hijinx in the sheer number of extra lives that either come in boxes are can be attained from the hundreds of pieces of fruit in the stage. You can easily get over a dozen lives in each playthrough.
90** In ''VideoGame/CrashBandicoot3Warped'', the wumpa fruit in [[spoiler: the secret level Eggipus Rex don't disappear like they usually do in Time Trail mode. As you [[AntiFrustrationFeatures don't lose lives]] in this mode, you can farm the wumpa fruit for more lives]].
91* ''VideoGame/MegaMan9'' has the Mystery Tank, a sort of mega E-Tank that refills your life and all of your special weapons. However, if you use it when all of your health and weapons are full, the tank instead turns all enemies on the screen when you exit out of the weapon selection screen into [[OneUp 1-Ups]]. You can only carry one at a time, but they're sold in the store, and if used in Galaxy Man's stage (where there are several blob enemies that split into smaller blobs when you attack them), you can refill your entire cache of extra lives in one sitting.
92** This trick originated from ''VideoGame/MegaMan5'', where Mega Tanks worked the same way when you used one with full life and weapon energy.
93** Not to mention Jewel Satellite + {{mook maker}}s for endless screws.
94** In ''VideoGame/MegaMan2'', you can use the egg-dropping robots' little birds to get a lot of random powerups quite easily (best when done with Metal Blade, but the Leaf Shield also works). Since among those powerups are large weapon energy ones, large hp ones and extra lives, you can just try and kill all the small birds just after the egg breaks and expect to get plenty of lives easily.
95*** The screws from Metal Man's stage respawn indefinitely and never directly on your position, making them a safer, slower alternative.
96** ''VideoGame/MegaMan8'' also has an easy way to rack up a comfortable number of lives through Clown Man's stage. At the start, kick a Mega Ball into the clown-head's mouth, and out pops a life. Although time consuming, as well as only being possible after clearing Clown Man's stage, one can get the extra life, leave, and come back. Rinse and repeat as needed.
97* Armored Armadillo's stage in ''VideoGame/MegaManX'' has a ShoutOut to the bat enemies from ''VideoGame/MegaMan2'' among the normal bat enemies. It frequently drops an extra life when killed, and respawns when offscreen. This is probably put in so players seeking the hidden [[Franchise/StreetFighter hadoken]] move in that level can easily gather enough lives to get it. [[note]]The capsule that has the move appears on the fifth time you get to the location of said capsule, and it’s far easier to kill yourself and spawn close to it as opposed to restarting the stage, but it can be gotten without dying.[[/note]]
98** A second, slightly conditional point in the game for this comes just before the boss of the first Sigma stage. There's a small hallway with a place where enemies drop on you from above. As long as you've got at least enough juice to charge a full-power shot of the Rolling Shield (full power generates a forcefield around you), you can stand under that point and anything that spawns will be instantly killed. It's time consuming (most enemies don't drop anything), but if you leave for a couple an hour or so you're pretty much guaranteed to have all weapon energy, full life bar, full subtanks (rechargable spare life bars) and max extra lives when you return.
99*** An even better spot for the above trick is the vertical shaft in the final (4th) Sigma stage, as the caterpillars always spawn from the same point, can't move quickly enough to avoid you, and in my experience have a much better chance of dropping lives than normal enemies.
100* ''VideoGame/CommanderKeen 2'' gave you lives at every 20,000 points (or so). One of the levels also had a section where you could kill about 80,000 points or so worth of enemies in a single go. And when you die, the level resets, complete with new enemies. Kill, suicide, kill, suicide, repeat. At least one level in ''3'' allows for the same abuse.
101** Both ''Commander Keen 4'' and ''5'' have a large amount of 1-ups hidden in the first level. They are, however, placed so that you can't kill yourself after obtaining them. Both games however *do* have a level with two 1-ups and a way to kill yourself after obtaining them.
102** In ''Commander Keen 6'', the Bean-with-Bacon Megarocket level looks innocuous, but leads to a hidden area containing 10,000 points and 2 vivas (the "[[LawOfOneHundred collect 100 for 1-up]]" item). While it is difficult to reach the items, and they are not worth enough on their own for a 1-up, you can complete the level and come back infinitely many times.
103* The early ''Franchise/DonkeyKong'' clone for CP/M computers, LADDER, gave you extra lives every 10,000 points. On the second level, it was possible to quickly get to the respawn chute for Der Rocks, jump on top of it, and simply hold down the space bar. Each time a Der Rock came out of the chute while you were in mid-air, you got points for jumping over it. Continue until time runs out and your Lad dies, then repeat. This early in the game, the timer clock was long enough that you were pretty much guaranteed at least 10,000 points each time you ran down the clock in this manner, so you could slowly build up as many lives and points as you wanted. Then, once you got bored with holding down the space bar, you could finish the level and head into the rest of the game with a ridiculous number of lives to play with.
104* ''Kirby's Dreamland 2'' has a rather ridiculous example: the game has [[ScoringPoints points]], and your points are saved in your save file. Thus, if you play long enough, you'll eventually reach the [[{{Cap}} maximum score]] of 9999990 points. When you've reached this number, ''everything'' in the game that gives any number of points will give you a 1-Up. Also, thankfully, the game doesn't play the 1-Up jingle if your lives are already maxed out.
105* ''VideoGame/SuperMonkeyBall'' has an odd variant: Advanced 11 and Expert 9 each have more than 100 bananas, making it possible to collect an extra life and some spare change towards another one, intentionally fall into the abyss, and repeat indefinitely if you're skilled enough. However, the vast majority of these bananas are on little rails, with a width equal to 1/10th the diameter of the ball. To compound the difficulty, to get more than 100 bananas requires you to switch between rails, which in turn requires you to nearly fall while rolling at top speed in order to smash into the edge of a platform or a piece of the scenery and bounce back up onto your destination. All with a time limit of 30 seconds. Only a couple of the world's best players can pull this off with any kind of consistency. See the strategies here: [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1uM4VXTXFk Advanced 11]] and [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KIT3gHYAo8 Expert 9]], only you're supposed to intentionally fall off at the end instead of going into the goal, in order to redo the level.
106* Possible UrExample: the "lurking" tactic in ''VideoGame/{{Asteroids}}''. When you have destroyed most of the asteroids in a screen, the game starts spawning small saucers to try to hurry you up. They are small (obviously), deadly accurate, but their photon pulses can't pass across the screen wraparound (unlike those of the big saucer and your ship) and they always spawn from the top corners of the screen. So you can clear the screen of all but one asteroid, park your ship at the top of the screen close to a corner, fire a continuous, horizontal stream of photons across the wraparound, and blast the small saucers as they appear and before they manage to fire a shot. Each small saucer is worth 1,000 points. You get a new life every 10,000 points. If you ever found an ''Asteroids'' game left abandoned with a big score and a two-figure life counter being steadily eaten away, this was probably why.
107* Although not a game with One-Ups, ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXII'' was made for this: With the Gambit system, you can set up your characters to act on their own so you aren't spending all your time micro-managing the action. What this means is if you find a monster that can spawn other monsters, you can effectively make use of the system to only target its weaker underlings. One of the better known areas is with the Ghasts made by Negalmuur in the Stilshrine of Miriam: Negalmuur can do virtually no HP damage and relies on countdown-to-death attacks, and the Ghasts are no challenge. Set up the gambits to cure the Doomed party leader and revive allies as soon as they're down and you can effectively leave the [=PS2=] on and effortlessly grind to level 99 and get the full array of License Points and some nice loot.
108* The ''VideoGame/ThunderForce'' series of shmups tends to have lenient [[Every10000Points extend]] points; in ''Thunder Force III'', for instance, you can have as many as 15 lives by the time you get to Stage 6.
109* The ArrangeMode in ''VideoGame/{{RayCrisis}}'' hands out 1-up items, as if they're regular powerup items. With some effort, it's possible to stay at the maximum of nine lives up to the FinalBoss. However, if you're playing for score, this is somewhat of a bad idea, because collecting 1-ups resets the point values of the point items.
110* ''Robotron 64'' has a low [[Every10000Points score]] requirement for extra lives, there are bonus round where you can't get killed and some levels have ton of them as items. It's very possible to have more than 90 of them by the 100th level while having died a few times.
111* One level in ''M.C. Kids'', a ''Super Mario Bros. 2'' clone/[=McDonalds=] product placement game, allows this. There's a pit where you can see two 1-ups. However, below that is a bottomless pit, so the idea was that a player would pick up one, then fall to his death, making it ineffective. On the contrary, due to some weird physics in the game, you can pick up one, then quickly float over to the adjacent 1-up. Pick it up, die once and repeat. It doesn't help that this is at the very beginning of the level.
112** There's a worse example than that - very early on in the game, there's a [[strike:bottomless pit]] [[GravityScrew topless ceiling]] where you can sacrifice one life to get about seven.
113* An obscure game called ''Tri-Heli'' (for the Platform/AtariST) allows this. To complete a level, you have to collect two diamonds. Each level, the points value of diamonds increases by an increasing amount, while the score needed to get an extra life either goes up by a fixed amount with each extra life earned, or stays constant (it's been a while). You can also spend a life to skip a level, and, while the difficulty tends to increase gradually over the levels, there's a short-term five-level cycle with the first level in each cycle being relatively easy, and the last being relatively hard/actively impossible. If you get far enough through the game, collecting one or both diamonds on the first level of a cycle gains you enough lives to skip the remaining four levels...
114* At the Butane Pain stage from ''Pac-Man World 2'', there is a [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_GIFmZgtYE hidden place with 8 lives, which respawn when Pac-Man dies.]] It's not even an EasterEgg, as you do need to go there to collect one of the level's tokens.
115* In the SNES game ''VideoGame/SuperStarWars'', there is a level called Land of the Sandpeople, where at one point you can drop down into a canyon holding down left while falling takes you to a secret area where you can get 7 lives. Then you have no choice but to jump down and die, but it still means 6 extra lives. Then when you restart the level, just repeat this process to gain 6 more lives. And another six after that up until 99 lives.
116** ''Super Empire Strikes Back'' had a LeapOfFaith cave containing five extra lives in an early level. The catch was that once you collected them, you had to jump in a BottomlessPit and die. You respawned a bit earlier in the level, meaning you could do the Leap of Faith again, ''ad nauseam''.
117* ''Revenge of Shinobi'' (the original Genesis version, not the [[InNameOnly GBA one]]) has an unusual example: at the beginning of the factory level, there's a hidden 1-Up item on the left side of the first conveyor belt immediately to the right of the starting point. It's virtually impossible to get this without falling into the adjacent pit and dying. The trick is that this item actually gives you ''two'' lives, and respawns when you die.
118* The Platform/ZXSpectrum graphic adventure game ''My Name is Uncle Groucho, You Win a Fat Cigar'' had a casino in the main town which offered a "Lucky Seven" game with a positive expectation (bets on throwing the number 7 with two dice paid off at odds of 9 to 1, the mathematically fair odds being 5 to 1), so if one was careful to avoid the "[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_ruin gambler's ruin]]", one could rack up endless amounts of money.
119* Not an infinite 1-up, but in the SNES game ''VideoGame/{{Soulblazer}}'', it is possible to gain ''infinite XP'', 1 experience point at a time, by repeatedly talking to a spirit in one of the gemstones. Though by the time you reach this in the game, there are far easier and quicker ways to rack up literally millions of XP points in minutes, so it's mostly a BraggingRightsReward for those who find this little gem...
120* ''Terminator'' for the [=NES=] gave lives for reaching point milestones, and it also had infinitely respawning enemies. Move next to an enemy respawn point, put something heavy on the fire button, walk away from the game, and come back to see your lives count reach the {{Cap}} of... ''six''.
121* ''[[VideoGame/GanbareGoemon Legend of the Mystical Ninja]]'' features a maze available between beating the first boss and getting on the cruise ship. The (quite simple) maze has an extra life every time you enter it and the level timer stops while you're in it, making it easy to rack up lives by entering and exiting repeatedly. While it costs 100 ryous to enter (a fairly hefty sum at this point), the maze also has 100 ryous in a treasure chest, completely negating the one potential downside.
122* ''VideoGame/TouhouKishinjouDoubleDealingCharacter'', collecting 60 or more items at once spawns a life fragment. Collect 3 life fragments and you earn an extra life. Meanwhile [=MarisaB=]'s bomb turns cancelled enemy bullets into power items. If you play your cards right, you can spawn and collect 2 batches of 60+ power items with a single bomb. Note that you get 3 bombs per life. However, this doesn't create a truly infinite loop since enemies fly off if you don't defeat them in time, and bosses have time limits. Plus you can only carry up to 8 extra lives at a time.
123* Reaching the highest rank in ''VideoGame/Police911'' is no easy feat, as deaths and [[HostageSpiritLink shooting civilians]] will demote you. But if you can pull it off, you'll get a 100-life bonus as a reward. However it is not a guaranteed win, because you can still get a GameOver by [[TimedMission running out of time]].
124* ''VideoGame/ZeldaIITheAdventureOfLink'' is the only game in the series to use a life system. It's also much more difficult to get 1-ups in this game than it is in most other games in this example, but due to the way the game's experience system works, each level up after you have maxed out all your stats leads to a 1-up. There are also parts of the game that allow for infinite experience farming. The easiest of these is in level 5, which contains a room where an infinite number of Moas can spawn (ghosts that give 50 exp each). The process is much slower than in most other games in this list, but it's possible to farm one life every minute or so. Because the game is NintendoHard, you'll probably need every single one of them. There's a video that demonstrates the process and explains more details about the technique [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUqKAsG-Cuw here]] (poor video quality, but much better description than most other videos available).
125* In ''VideoGame/TheAdventuresOfLomax'', there are a few levels where there is more than one OneUp available, enabling you to get all of them, kill yourself, and repeat as many times as you want.
126* In ''Kid Kool'', getting to the top of a spring pole in stage 1-3 (not a difficult trick) allows you to collect ten 1-ups on a single life.
127* In ''VideoGame/ConkersBadFurDay'', on the farm, there is a hidden squirrel tail that gives nine lives instead of the usual one. When you die, squirrel tails respawn, so you can keep collecting the hidden tail again and again.
128* In ''VideoGame/HackNSlash'', there is an event in which an NPC gives you 10 additional hearts added onto your maximum health. However, not long after, it is possible to reset the flag that says it occurred, enabling you to repeat the event again and again. The interesting part? Said flag being reset is not a glitch. In fact, this is the function of an item given specifically for this purpose. It even goes so far as to specifically say the name of the variable that's being reset. Of course, if you've played this game much past that part, that seems like ''nothing''.
129** At this point in the game, it becomes obvious that MeaninglessLives is an intentional design choice.
130* ''VideoGame/SuperBomberman5'' has 2 kind of enemies (A camera with legs at world 5 and a cute plushie with a hammer at world 4) which can turn your bombs into powerups, such as lifevests and remote bombs, and also may yield extra lives, turning them into living armories.
131* {{Bonus Level}}s in ''VideoGame/{{Bug|1995}}'' involve collecting medals (every 10 or so collected gives you a life). One of them in the second-to-last world stands out -- Bug starts out on a platform above the "arena", the entire floor of which is filled with springs (that only work on Bug) while huge snowballs are dropped into and bounce all over the arena. Every time a snowball hits the ground, it spawns a medal, and the number of snowballs increases over time. Unlike several other bonus zones there's no time limit and no limit to the amount of medals that Bug can collect until he get hit and booted out, meaning that if you let Bug stay on the platform above until the ground is littered with medals then quickly venture down to grab an area of medals, he may be able to get several lives [[NintendoHard which you'll need]].
132* This is how contestant Michael Larson was able to go on his infamous $110,237 run on ''Series/PressYourLuck''. At the time, there were two spaces on the board that guaranteed an extra spin. Utilizing his knowledge of the board patterns, Larson was able to time his spins so that he always landed on one of these two spaces, ensuring he had a virtually endless supply of spins with which to rack up insane amounts of cash.

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