Law of 100

aka: Law Of 100

Toad: There's gotta be a million coins here!
Luigi: Enough to buy a new life.
Mario: Enough to buy 10,000 new lives.

— The Brothers Mario

All Platform Games will have at least one type of common item that will give you an extra life if you collect one hundred of them.

Collecting these items is mostly for points, but if you can get 100 of these items, you will get an extra life, and the counter will revert to 0. One hundred is the magic number because the counters for these items usually contain only two digits.

Most of the time, the extra lives from these items are either too frequent to be meaningfully valuable or too infrequent to be meaningfully beneficial. The real reason for these items is that placing long trails of them throughout the levels motivates the player to progress onward, and the crisp 'collecting' sounds and the increasing counter gives a sense of achievement and progress to anything, even running to the right.

A Sister Trope to Every 10,000 Points.

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Examples:

Non-Video Game Examples

Anime and Manga

• The plot of The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You starts after Rentarou has been rejected by a girl for the 100th time. After praying for a girlfriend in the shrine of Love, the God of Love tells him that -thanks to a distraction while working- he was granted 100 soulmates he must make happy, or else they all will die.
• In Gantz, the characters are scored in each mission. Upon reaching 100 points, they are given the choice between being set free (and being Mind Wiped to preserve The Masquerade), receiving a powerful weapon, or resurrecting a comrade who was killed in a previous mission.
• In Soul Eater, Demon weapons must collect the souls of 99 evil humans and 1 witch in order to become a "Death's Weapon" or Death Scythe, a weapon worthy of being wielded by Death himself.

Live Action TV

• On the children's game show Raven, the contestants can win back a life via collecting a certain number of rings starting in Series 2 (7 rings win back a life in Series 2 and 3 but was increased to nine rings being needed in Series 4 through 10).

Pinball

• In Congo, collecting 100 diamonds activates the Super Multiball Wizard Mode.

Web Animation

• Battle for Dream Island: In Episode 18, the scoreboard is downgraded due to budget cuts. It can no longer hold triple-digit numbers, so anything that hits one-hundred loops back to zero. This works against Pencil, who wins the competition but goes up for elimination.

Action Game

• Bomberman 64 gives you a continue whenever you got 50 gems. Annoyingly, continues send you back to the level-select screen; to continue from a level checkpoint, you need lives. You start each "continue" with three lives... and the game doesn't provide you with any ways to get more. Very annoying when you're a One-Hit-Point Wonder in a Nintendo Hard game.
• In Carrie's Order Up!, getting 40 coins erases a miss. Not quite an extra life, as you can't earn more than what you start with.
• Claws of Furry: You start the game with 100 hit points. Same for whenever you continue the game after quitting it (if you're playing on Pussycat Mode).
• Mendel Palace does this, and gives your character a slight speed boost for every 100 stars he collects.
• Metallic Child:
  • Rona starts the game with 100 units of health.
  • When you get the core level gauge to 100%, you'll be able to install Super-Cores.
• Turrican adds a continue for each 300 diamonds the player collects. Turrican II: The Final Fight reduce the amount required to 100.

Action Adventure

• Kid Baby Starchild: Collect 100 purple jewels in at least the first level to be able to collect one of four Leviathan facades.
• Shadowman has the Cadeux, 100 of which can be traded for a life bar extension.

First Person Shooter

• Rise of the Triad The original game is a rare First-Person Shooter example. It has ankh coins, with some of them worth 5, 10 or 25 ankh coins.
• The early Turok games have little collectible diamonds that get you a life each time you collect 100 (complete with two-digit-only counter). The purples (Turok 1)/reds (Turok 2) count for 10, while the yellows count for 1. In Turok 3, you get unlimited lives. Getting 100 diamonds (yellows count for 1, reds count for 10) instead gives you a Life Bar extension. Also, there are only 100 in each level, which means your Life Bar top out at 150 HP (100 to start, plus 10 for each 100 diamonds).
• The Adrenaline from Unreal Tournament 2004: collect 100 of the pills, and you can activate a special bonus such as super speed or healing.

Platformer

• 102 Dalmatians: Puppies to the Rescue has 100 dog bones to collect in every level, which both unlock an optional flyby cutscene, along with one of the level's stickers for an in-game stickerbook.
• In The Adventures of Lomax, collecting 100 coins gives you an additional life. Averted with defeated enemies - you gain access to a bonus level after defeating only 50 of them.
• Adventure Story has 100 coins and 10 treasure chests in every level. The completed level will display a gold star when all are collected.
• In Aladdin (Capcom), Aladdin collects gems. 100 emeralds will get you a spin on Genie's wheel (good for extra lives, continues). Rubies are worth multiple emeralds, and collecting enough of them unlocks different credit sequences.
• Made more difficult in Banjo-Kazooie, which has 100 musical notes on each level that reset themselves if you die or leave the world. Collecting all of them on one run gets you an extra life (since lives are relatively easy to scoop on their own, the bigger purpose of the notes is to open Note Doors in Gruntilda's Lair to progress in the game). The sequels have musical notes as well, clocking at 100 per level again in Tooie and Grunty's Revenge (and way more in Nuts & Bolts), but since the main characters now have unlimited lives the trope is averted.
• Bug has crystals. Getting 100 of them doesn't net you an extra life, but you need to collect at least 100 in each act if you want to play the bonus level for a chance to get an extra continue.
• In the A Bug's Life Licensed Game, collecting all 50 pieces of grain in every level fully restores the health meter, and collecting all the letters of Flik's name grants an extra life (maximum 9).
• Castle of Magic has an especially difficult system. Every time you take a hit in your standard form, you lose 20 diamonds, and can re-collect up to 10 of them. Take a hit with 0 diamonds, and you die. Take a hit in a powered-up form, and you lose the power-up. Take a hit with less than 20 diamonds, and you lose all of them (but can still re-collect up to 10, unless you have less than 10 to begin with.) Get 100 diamonds, though, and you get an extra life, but all your diamonds vanish. You do the math from there.
• Commander Keen: In later games (namely after the episodic Vorticon trilogy), the desired items change with each installment, but collecting 100 always rewards Billy with an extra life. In episodes four, it is "life water" droplets. In five, it's a commercial drink called Vitalin. In episode six, it's odd little winged creatures called vivas. Fittingly, the Extra Life items are related to them in some way: A Lifewater Flask in episode four, a barrel full of Vitalin drink in five, and a Queen Viva in six.
• Crash Bandicoot: Collecting 100 Wumpa fruit grants an extra life. This is humorously lampshaded in Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, where Nate is playing the first Crash Bandicoot game:
  Elena: "Okay, grab the fruit."
  Nate: "What does the fruit do?"
  Elena: "A hundred gives you an extra life."
  Nate: "A hundred? Who's got time to pick a hundred pieces of fruit?"
• Joe & Mac: Congo's Caper gives an extra life for every 100 small diamonds collected. A large diamond is a 1-Up in itself.
• Croc:
  • The first game turns this into a giant screw-you fest. Diamonds represent life; get hit while holding none and you die. This on top of a Sonic Ring-like mechanic where getting hit will drop ALL of them, but only a few can actually be recovered from the grond. Get 99 and gain one? You get one measly life in exchange for all the diamonds. Avoiding diamonds coming up. A secondary system exists where all your total diamonds in the level are banked once you get to the end, with every 100 giving a life.
  • Adjusted in Croc 2, where the Sonic-style dropping mechanic is replaced with multiple hit points and unlimited lives. Now, levels have a set total of 100 diamonds: getting 50 restores one hit, while all 100 will get you back to health.
• Donkey Kong Country games have bananas, either singular or bunches of ten. Averted with Donkey Kong 64, which doesn't use bananas for lives (the game doesn't have lives at all, since they were scrapped during the development process). There are exactly 100 bananas for each character in each world, but only 75 are needed in each case to earn a Banana Medal. The remaining 25 are purely optional (getting #100 will net you a completion audio jingle, but that's it). Their main use is to open the door to boss of the world they are collected in, by feeding them to a pig, who will weight down a platform that boosts his buddy up so he can pull the lever that opens the door.
• Drake and the Wizards: In the first game, collecting 100 coins gives you an extra life.
• In Fancy Pants Adventures, not only do Squiggles heal lost health, collecting 100 of them gets Fancy Pants Man an extra life.
• In the NES Felix the Cat game, collecting 100 disembodied Felix heads will grant you an extra life.
• FreezeME has a variation, where collecting 150 Red Pigcoins on each level gives you a Golden Cube. The number is probably higher due to the levels in the game being really big.
• Garfield's Nightmare: Garfield will get an extra life for every 100 donuts he gathers in the levels.
• In Gex: Enter the Gecko, you are required to collect 30, then 40, then 50 of some random token (It actually changed appearance with each goal reached, but they're still found in the same place). The first two goals grant you an extra life, but the 50 collection goal gives you a remote, which is the game's equivalent of Mario 64 Stars.
• The TurboGrafx-16 version of Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu has orbs to collect from defeated enemies. Collecting 100 of them will completely restore life and Kamehame Hadokens. The NES version (which is a shorter game) requires only 30.
• Jersey Devil gives you an extra life for every 100 Pumpkins you collect.
• In Karnov, collecting 50 K symbols gives the title character an extra life. Psycho-Nics Oscar, also by Data East, gave an extra life for collecting 20 K symbols, though "Oscar" doesn't start with a K.
• In Kaze and the Wild Masks, collecting one hundred crystals in a level awards the player with a crystal medal. Collecting them all awards the player with an extended ending where Kaze returns Hogo to normal.
• Keio Flying Squadron 2 gives an extra life for every 100 bunnies collected.
• A few Kirby games do this with stars. Kirby's Dream Land 2 requires a mere seven, Kirby's Dream Land 3 and Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards bump this up to thirty, and Kirby: Canvas Curse finally gets to one hundred, which persists in the modern main-series games starting with Kirby's Return to Dream Land.
• Marsupilami: Hoobadventure: The game contains Crash Bandicoot-esque fruits whose only purpose is to give you extra lives with every 100 collected. Unfortunately they're so common that extra lives become completely meaningless.
• Ninja Senki has coins... but they're only valuable because collecting them gives you 10 points, and a 1000 points either equates a lifebar refill or (if the lifebar is already full), an extra life. These points are also obtained by defeating enemies, so coins themselves aren't quite as valuable.
• In Plok, 100 shells give an extra life. However, after you acquire the amulet, you can also spend shells to temporarily give Plok an extra attack (he turns into a buzzsaw when he does his spin jump). How long the attack is available depends on how many shells you spend.
• The first Rayman game has small, blue sparkling spheres called 'tings', which make "ting" sounds whenever you get them (except in later releases, in which case they make more of a "pop" noise). Collecting 100 earned you an extra life.
• Red Goddess: Inner World: Divine starts the game with a Life Meter containing 100 hit points.
• Standard coins in Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus, though it works a bit differently. If you have no "charm" (protects your One-Hit-Point Wonder character from a single hit), it gives you one. If you already have one, it gives you another. If you already have two, then you get an extra life, as two are the maximum. If you already have 99 lives and two charms, then the "coin" counter won't progress past 99. This is rather useful, so that if you take a hit, you can collect a single (very common) coin and be back to two charms.
• The rings in the Sonic the Hedgehog series downplay this mechanic, while playing with it in other ways. All Sonic titles follow this basic framework, with minor variations.
  • Collecting a multiple of 100 rings does not reset the counter to zero, as holding any amount of rings (be it one or one thousand) will protect Sonic against a single hit.
  • The 8-bit (Master System and Game Gear) versions do not follow this rule; the ring counter resets to zero once Sonic collects 100 rings. If he collects exactly 100 rings and gets hit, he'll still lose a life.
  • Collecting 100 or 200 rings awards an extra life, but further multiples of 100 do not.
    • Sonic Heroes is an exception, it is entirely possible to max out your ring count at 999 in the second enemy swarm boss with Team Chaotix, and get 9 extra lives from it!
    • Acts containing upwards of 200 rings are not uncommon, and in Sonic Unleashed, it is quite possible to collect more than 400 rings in almost any main day stage.
    • Sonic Colors,^note In both versions, you get 1 life for an A-rank and three for an S-rank when you finish a level Shadow the Hedgehog,^note Instead, you get extra lives for having 100 or more rings when you touch a checkpoint. the Sonic Storybook Series titles^note Both titles just give you an unlimited number of tries to beat a level. and the Wii / PlayStation 2 version of Sonic Unleashed^note Which instead have the extra lives in the Gaia Gates do not give you a one-up upon getting 100 rings.
  • Taking a single hit will reset the ring counter to zero. However, reaching 100 rings twice in a single stage (for example, by collecting 100, taking damage, and collecting 100 again) will not award a second extra life. Same for collecting 200 rings.
  • In Sonic Unleashed, the Werehog survives on a life meter rather than rings, so getting hurt will not reset the ring counter.
  • Having 50 or more rings when you activate checkpoints or reach the end of an act usually grants access to a bonus stage. Which combined with the counter reset in the early games can turn the extra life at 100 into a Power-Up Letdown.
  • The Super Sonic form requires 50 rings to activate, drains one ring per second, and deactivates upon running out of rings. In Sonic Generations, the rate is increased to two rings per second.
• Speedy Gonzales: Los Gatos Bandidos and Speedy Gonzales Aztec Adventure give Speedy an extra life for every 100 pieces of cheese collected. The catch? That's collected in that particular round — once Speedy goes to the next round, the count resets to zero.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: SuperSponge has you collect 100 golden spatulas in order to earn an extra life. The catch is that these are actually collectibles that you need for 100% Completion where collecting 100 each level can earn you bonus level and content. The problem? A single touch from an enemy or hazard makes you lose every single spatula you have collected in the entire level and you only have about 5 seconds to retrieve them all before they disappear.
• Stitchy In Tooki Trouble: Every 100 corn cobs Stitchy collects gives him an extra life.
• Super Magnetic Neo gives Neo an extra life for every 100 Zebi he collects.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario Bros.: The game set the tradition in itself and subsequent 2D Super Mario games to reward Mario (or any playable character currently at use) with an extra life for every 100 coins gathered in normal gameplay; it doesn't have to be 100 coins within the same level, as the current amount is carried over to any next level. The exceptions are Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins (in both games, coins are used in the gambling minigames to earn lives). This coin exchange also applies to the 3D games Super Mario 3D Land and Super Mario 3D World, as well as the Yoshi's Island subseries.
  • In Vs. Super Mario Bros. (an arcade version of the original with some changes to make it harder), depending on DIP switch settings, Mario might need to collect as many as 250 coins to get an extra life.
  • In Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine, 100 coins in one run on one stage allow you to get a Star or Shine Sprite for that level, respectively. You also get lives for coins when you finish a level, but at 50 per life (stopping at 150 coins in 64), and the extras are just wasted.
  • In Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2, you can collect both coins and Star Bits. Fifty Star Bits equal one life. Same goes for 50 coins. You don't get an extra life for collecting 50 collectibles total, though; they have to be 50 Star Bits or 50 coins. Meanwhile, collecting 100 purple coins in the missions where they appear is rewarded with a Star.
  • In Wario Land and Virtual Boy Wario Land, it's "100 heart points equals an extra life." Virtual Boy Wario Land has a small heart equalling 1 heart point, a large heart equals 10.
• Super Monkey Ball:
  • In the first game, collecting one hundred bananas gets you an extra life. For some reason, the banana counter actually has three digits, and immediately resets to zero when you pick up your 100th banana.
  • In Super Monkey Ball 2's story mode, though, the hundreds digit is actually used, and the counter displays how many bananas you collected across all the stages. Also, in story mode, Death Is a Slap on the Wrist, so extra lives don't really matter.
• Suzy Cube: Suzy gains an extra life with every hundred coins that she collects.
• Tiny Hands Adventure: For every 100 pieces of meat that Borti collects, he gains an extra life.
• In Vice: Project Doom, 100 coins gets you an extra life.
• In the Wacky Races Platform Game for the NES, Muttley gets an extra life for every 100 diamonds collected.

Shoot 'Em Up

• Touhou Kaikidan ~ Mystic Square gives you an extra life for every 100 point items collected. Touhou Youyoumu ~ Perfect Cherry Blossom and Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night did something similar, but the intervals at which you gain lives are altered to more closely match the rate at which you get point items.
• In Warning Forever's 3 Lives mode, destroying 100 boss parts grants an extra life. Interestingly, the parts destroyed aren't part of a separate counter; rather, your life counter has two decimal places (i.e. "3.00" lives instead of "3"), so destroying a part increases your lives by 0.01.

Survival Horror

• Hanako: The Player Character's health is indicated by a percentage number in the inventory screen. 100% means full health.
• Madman (2022): The Player Character's Life Meter is located in the bottom-left corner of the item menu. 100% is when you're at full health.

Wide Open Sandbox

• Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City has 100 hidden packages to find. This doesn't gain you extra life points, but each batch of 10 causes an extra weapon spawn point at your hideouts.

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