A warp zone is usually an area in a video game where players can go from one place or level to another. They are sometimes used as cheats like in Super Mario Bros. where they can be used to skip several levels entirely and access a later stage. Other times like in Donkey Kong 64, Landstalker: The Treasures of King Nole and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening the player character can only use a warp to travel to another warp they have already visited, not to ones they have never seen, this means they have to make the journey by normal route at least once but are not required to travel the same paths over and over again if they need to visit areas from earlier in the game. They were particularly useful during the period when there was no or limited battery backup, since they would save players from having to replay areas every time players started again. In the Super Mario Bros. series, warp pipes are used in warp zones to transport the player from one area of the game to the other. The original Super Mario Bros. game contains a bug that allows the player to enter a Warp Zone in such a way that it will bring the player to the Minus World, an underwater level that loops continuously.
Warp Zones are also known as "warps" in some circles and while they're not a crucial element of the Sonic the Hedgehog games, in Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie's "Planet Freedom" they serve as a convenient form of transportation.
Their first known appearances were 1980's Pac-Man, as areas where players can walk to the far left or far right side of the screen and they take them to the opposite side and ones that allow players advancement passed certain levels in Crystal Castles from 1983 and Dragon Crystal in 1992. In more advanced versions of Crystal Castles, they are orbs, or something else closer related to modern games.
Read more about Warp Zone: Unreal, Space Strategy
Famous quotes containing the words warp and/or zone:
“All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive. But strong natures, backwoodsmen, New Hampshire giants, Napoleons, Burkes, Broughams, Websters, Kossuths, are inevitable patriots, until their life ebbs, and their defects and gout, palsy and money, warp them.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There was a continuous movement now, from Zone Five to Zone Four. And from Zone Four to Zone Three, and from us, up the pass. There was a lightness, a freshness, and an enquiry and a remaking and an inspiration where there had been only stagnation. And closed frontiers. For this is how we all see it now.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)