A point within the action of a video game to which the player can return after play has been interrupted, especially by player character death. Consoles made this method popular in the dark ages when they only had a few megabytes worth of flash storage (if that) and so couldn't do proper save/load like hard-drive-equipped PCs could. Nowadays we have consoles with hard disks and cheap flash memory, but checkpoints are still alive as an efficient method for enabling savegames without spending lots of resources implementing a dynamic save system, or for simply challenging the player.