About a year or two ago I actually watched a documentary on the progression of "death" in video games over the decades.

It sort of started out as a checkpoint, then they added collectible lives. Once you run out of those, then you start back at the checkpoint. Eventually we got to where we are now with periodic auto-save and manual save features. You never really die (whether there's a spot that tracks it or not).

Certainly we still have plenty representation for all these standard variations.