History Main / InfiniteOneUps

* An obscure game called ''Tri-Heli'' (for the UsefulNotes/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...

* The UsefulNotes/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.

** 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 [[EveryTenThousandPoints 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]].

* The ''VideoGame/ThunderForce'' series of shmups tends to have lenient [[EveryTenThousandPoints extend]] points; in ''Thunder Force III'', for instance, you can have as many as 15 lives by the time you get to Stage 6.

* ''Robotron 64'' has a low [[EveryTenThousandPoints 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.

* In various ''VideoGame/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.

* {{Bonus Level}}s in ''VideoGame/{{Bug}}'' 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]].

* Reaching the highest rank in ''VideoGame/{{Police 911}}'' 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]].

** With its many GameMaker tools, ''VideoGame/SuperMarioMaker'' and [[VideoGame/SuperMarioMaker2 its sequel]] allows this in multiple ways (even to the point of having canons 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.

** The Koopa Shell Bounce exploit is even shown in the 9-Volt/18-Volt character video in ''VideoGame/{{WarioWare}}: Smooth Moves'', accompanied by three giant "1-UP"s.

** ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBros1'': There's the infamous "Koopa Shell Bounce" (where you corner a Koopa 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—''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!)

*** 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.

*** You can also reload that same level from the checkpoint which spawns you next to a cycling powerup box. 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. Then, simply exit out of this level by pressing Start and Select, which lets you start again back at the checkpoint. Repeat the process until you have all the 1-Ups you need.

** ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBros1'': There's the infamous "Koopa Shell Bounce" (where you corner a Koopa 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—''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.

** 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.

* 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]].

* 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 [[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]]

** ''Yoshi's Island'' makes it even easier, due to lacking a time limit, having Yoshi swallow and carry a shell not resetting 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.

*** 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.

* 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...

* ''[[VideoGame/{{Touhou}} Double Dealing Character]]'', 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.

*** 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.