1UP

"When you grab one of these, you'll automatically get an extra life!"

- Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards instruction manual

A 1UP (can be spelled any number of ways, also called an extra life) is an item that appears in almost every Kirby game (and is also a common video game item). It gives Kirby an extra life and the player an extra chance to beat the game. If Kirby loses a life, the life count goes down by 1, and he must restart the stage from the beginning; losing all of them results in a game over, and he must start the level over again. As these items can be very useful, they are usually hidden, or in places that may cost a life to get to. They may also be rewarded to the player for doing well at a sub-game.

The existence of 1UPs to characters has since been verified in Kirby Super Star and its remake, where (had the player gone into the correct room) Mace Knight has been revealed to have hoarded them (and a lot of food) within the Halberd, to which Captain Vul then comments upon (although in Kirby Super Star, Mace Knight only mentions tomatoes).

Three Kirby bubbles, an item in Kirby: Squeak Squad, can be combined in Kirby's stomach, generating an automatic 1UP.

Appearance
In early games, they appear simply as a text block that reads "1UP"; in later games starting with Kirby Super Star (with the exceptions of Kirby's Dream Land 3 and Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards), they are pictures of the player's current playable character with the word "1UP" in front of him/her. In the Extra Mode of Kirby's Return to Dream Land, the 1UP still shows Kirby, but with a crown.