Having played most of the Sierra and LucasArts games when I was much younger, I feel, though cannot confirm, that there was a shift in these kinds of games such that you couldn't actually progress too far beyond a fail state.

That is, by about Space Quest II or III, you could still take an action that would lead to your death within a minute or so, but you could no longer take actions that would lead you to dying/being unable to finish many, many scenes later.

Can anyone confirm this?

And I feel like the later LucasArts games (Day of the Tentacle, etc) you could never actually be in a fail state.