What about games that take you back to the last checkpoint after death, with no waiting involved? (Super Meat Boy, Celeste, modern kaizo Mario hacks)

Undertale does this as well, I believe. (Except for a couple situations; one involves one non-standard boss fight, while the other is a humorous ending that happens if you make the wrong choice in the game's hardest boss battle.)

Even better would be some of the ending messages in some classic Sierra games. (In Quest for Glory 1, try picking your nose (but save first, of course, unless you started a new game just to test this).)

The Batman Arkham series has several amazing Game Over screens where you're taunted by an enemy from Batman's Rogues gallery leaning over you in a first-person view and saying something you'd expect from that character. It is sensitive to the point of the story you are in and which enemy or whose mooks delivered the final blow.

I'd post a link to some youtube videos but I'm at work and can't search for them.

Edit: Aw man! Ninja'd.

System Shock, in which you get to see the hacker converted into a cortex reaver.

The Ninja Gaiden arcade game always stuck with me because the ninja is tied down and struggling while a buzzsaw slowly approaches. If you put in a new credit and continue, he's saved. If not, the screen goes red.

It's funny when it happens during a lives underflow glitch.

The game says "GAME OVER", but then continues shortly afterwords.

(To get this to happen, in (classic) Sonic 1 or 2, just drawn and either hit a spike or time over at about the same time; this will cause you to lose 2 lives. If you do this on your last life, you will end up with -1 (which is treated as 255) lives, the "GAME OVER" message will appear, but you'll be able to continue anyway.)

What is a Game Over? Is it a reminescent of "Ye Olde English"?

I wouldn't know. Never encountered any.

https://media1.tenor.com/images/dd587cf7900d0be52b0a5cd2ed9aac09/tenor.gif?itemid=17341427

Those aren't game overs, of course. They're just a loss of a life/guy down. The game doesn't reach a state of finality or overness.

Yeah, but the big difference is that Jeff Vogel let you put your hand on the stove, while Roberta Williams was a madwoman to not even remotely be trusted, in terms of game design.

In Lay: In Exile, it was your mistake, willfully. In Sierra games, you could just miss an item and only 80 screens later are you informed you needed it and are now dead.

The Quest for Glory games are different:
* Roberta Williams was not involved with them, to my understanding.
* The developers made an effort to avoid situations like the "dead man walking" that plagues other classic Sierra games. In fact, in QfG4, if you don't get a certain item before the endgame, it will appeear in your inventory anyway to ensure that the game is not unwinnable. (Note that it may still be possible to make some of these games unwinnable, but for QfG, it's a mistake rather than an intentional design decision.)

I've played the first two games (especially the second one) more times than I can count but haven't ever heard of that glitch.. I'm gonna have to check it out next time I play it, thanks!

For the fast method of doing this glitch in Sonic 2 (trigger warning (?): Sonic drowning music):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lYAqke2y-A

The slower method (but easier to time, I believe) is to go into the water when the timer reads 9:29, then drown on purpose.

Also, remember that, in either case, you need to have exactly 1 life left for this to work.

There's also the Sonic 1 trick of luring an enemy to the goal, hitting the sign post, and then getting killed during the score countdown; this lets you start the next level with 0 lives remaing. Note that this won't work if the score countdown takes too long (it's my favorite example of a race condition, because it's slow enough to be easily observed), and that this does not work in Sonic 2. You get a nice glitchy version of the game over message super-imposed on the score talley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H2MMVf0rg0

Very nice, that's pretty awesome tbh.

It is rather literal. The game is over. Be it victory or defeat.

When failing in a video game almost feels like a reward :
   ▪  Total Distortion؜   ( MobyGames )

Meeting a game developer sometimes leads to a game over :
   ▪  Asylum؜   ( Lemon64 )

"Game Over" on victory has always felt wrong to me.