Billy Mitchell (left) is also famous for being a former Donkey Kong World Champion, and was one of the lead personalities in the story of newcomer Steve Wiehe’s (Right) attempt to eclipse Mitchell’s High Score, as documented in The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. And for one man, Pac-Man’s Kill Screen and perfect score of 3,333,360 points, would become his most prestigious badge of honour. With the end game coming, there was ultimately no longer any room for error. You see, now rather than becoming a game of endurance, for the world’s best Pac-Man players, the game was now a battle for perfection. As such, this also had the side effect of forever altering the way the world’s best played the iconic game. As this game breaking glitch effectively gave the game a stopping point, it therefore effectively capped the highest possible score to 3,333,360 points. Record Breakerīreaking the never ending nature of the game wasn’t the only side effect of Pac-Man’s 256 glitch though. And that’s without focusing on grabbing a high score. A true challenge even for the best of players. This is because even to this day, activating the legendary glitch requires somewhere in the region of three to six hours of non-stop play. These rumours were even given further credence thanks to how difficult it was to actually cause the infamous Kill Screen to occur. You see, back in the days before the internet, many believed this to be nothing more than a myth. Nevertheless, despite it’s negative connotations, the glitch within Pac-Man’s 256th stage actually became something of a Holy Grail moment for gamers. Effectively trapping the player in an impossible maze. Therefore, as far as the game is concerned, the player hasn’t consumed the number of pellets required to move on. Toru Iwatani, creator of Pac-Man.įinally, the game also doesn’t account for the fact that this garbled mess has removed some of the pellets from the game. This creates a conflict within the game, one that causes the game’s drawing routine to present glitches symbols to the player, as it is attempting create symbols from missing data. However, on the other hand the fruit counter’s logic was not designed for this, and instead tries to continue on to board 256. Consequently, when another 1 is added, this causes the value to overflow to 0000000 or 0.Īs such, this overflow causes the game to revert back to board 0. You see, Pac-Man’s level counter was simply a single 8-bit byte, and as such could only store 256 distinct values due to the fact that in binary the highest storable number with eight 1 digits is 255. The reason for this happening goes all the way back to the core programming of Toru Iwatani’s generation defining game. At this point the right hand side of the stage becomes a corrupted mess of numbers, letters and symbols, rendering the stage, and as such the game itself, completely unplayable. This glitch occurs as soon as stage 256 begins. So what exactly is Pac-Man’s 256th stage? Well, as previously explained, 256 is a bug within the game that prevents the player from ever truly finishing the stage. Yes, that’s right, welcome to the ultimate Kill Screen, welcome to Pac-Man’s infamous 256th level. Not only that but, this ultimate glitch would go on to become the basis for its very own game. In fact, it became so famous that gamers would actually hone their skills in order to see the legendary de-facto end game with their own eyes. However, amongst all of these, there was one that always stood above the rest, the Kill Screen to end all Kill Screens if you will. What’s more, they’d always end the same way for the player – Game Over. Whether it was Donkey Kong’s unbeatable timer, Galaga’s “existential void”, or even Frogger’s completely random game ending error, these software bugs and errors in the code would result in unpredictable gameplay and strange glitches. You may not know it today, but Kill Screens can actually be found in some of the most famous games to come out of the Golden Age of the Arcade. No ifs buts or maybes, when a game was known to have a kill screen, it meant one thing, that the game was ultimately impossible to finish. If there ever was something that would strike fear into the heart of a retro gamer, it was this.
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