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In NetHack you can sacrifice sufficiently fresh corpses at altars for various benefits. Are there any earlier games where such sacrifices are a general game mechanic? Going by the TV Tropes page on Offerings to the Gods NetHack, circa 1987, seems to be the earliest.

There's only so many games before then. Pre-1980 has about 50, and TVTropes knows about 500 between 1980 and 1987.

(By "general game mechanic" I mean "excluding altar sacrifices which are done only to solve a puzzle and/or advance the plot".)

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Well, probably some previous game in the Roguelike genre would be the first user of the mechanic, if altar-based sacrifice wasn't a NetHack innovation.

Not much info is easily accessible about them, but Wikipedia on 1982's Sword of Fargoal says:

Each dungeon level contains a temple. When the warrior steps into a temple, their gold is sacrificed to their deity, which earns the character additional experience.

Sword of Fargoal was game based on the now-lost GammaQuest by the same creator, so we don't know if that sacrifice mechanic was itself inherited or an innovation.

There's no specific altar, but is that close enough?

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