Health bar (video games)

A health bar is a image in video games that show the player how much health they have left. If the player's health bar is completely empty or the number shown is zero, the player will usually lose a life or die. Many games have health pick-ups that will give the player back lost health if they touch or use them. The health bar is used in many types of video games, including first-person shooters, fighter games, role-playing games, and platformers. Even though many first-person gives the player regenerating health instead of a health bar, there are still some shooter games that have health bars. Most fighter games use health bars, but there are some like the Super Smash Bros. games that measure health by damage percentage. In such games, the goals is to knock the opponent off stage, rather than kill the opponent, and the higher the damage percentage, the further attacks will knock the opponent off stage.

In some cases, after you have taken an amount of damage, you can get your health back by just simply waiting for it. The first game with this feature was Punch Out!! for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Many people think Halo was the first First-person shooter game to have health regeneration, but it was not. Health regeneration was not even in the first Halo game, but it was added in Halo 2 and was a feature in most Halo games since then. Even so, it has existed in shooter games before Halo.^[1] Nonetheless, since Halo 2, it became more common to have have health regeneration instead of health bars and it later became standard in shooter games. Other shooter games that use health regeneration include the Call of Duty games, the Gears of War games, and the Sniper Elite games.