s long as there have been videogames, there have been penalties for dying in videogames. In the earliest days dying meant losing out on a high score or having to put another coin in the arcade machine. As technology progressed, so did our protections against the harshest deaths—we got saves, checkpoints, bonfires. But a few game developers decided all that progress was nonsense. Games didn't just need to be harder, actually—they needed to be mean as hell...
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Early MMOs came up with the most painful game mechanic of all time, and it's somehow still in use today
Source: PC Gamer (opens in a new tab)