It is an inevitable fact of gaming that at some point every game has to end. This can be for several reasons; sometimes the game ends naturally, sometimes the player just decides that a game isn’t worth their time anymore, and other times the player just doesn’t have the ability to get past a certain point.
However, there are some games that in theory should have no ending, but no matter how skilled the player is, it is impossible to continue. This is usually caused by programming errors, glitches, or memory limitations, but whatever the cause, these kill screens have earned a place in the game’s embarrassment over the years.
5 Pac-Man
The most famous kill screen on this list, the 256th screen in Namco’s groundbreaking food-based maze game, has become the stuff of a gaming legend. Upon reaching the 256th level of Pac-Man players are presented with a maze whose right half has turned into a jumble of numbers and letters. While it is possible to collect some items on this screen, it is ultimately impossible to progress and defeat.
This phenomenon is due to a programming oversight called integer overflow. In a nutshell Pac-Man keeps track of the player’s level using an unsigned 8-bit integer that can range from 0 to 255. Attempting to bring the counter past 255, it returns to 0. The game is never coded with this possibility in mind and as a result there is ultimately only enough memory to represent half of the maze.
4 duck hunting
A classic from the 8-bit era, duck hunting was for many players their first introduction to light gun games. Players often spent hours trying to get as far in the game as possible, with each round becoming increasingly difficult. What most players in the 80s could never have imagined was the possibility of reaching 100, and apparently the programmers at Nintendo didn’t either.
Duck Hunts level counter was once designed to hold two numbers, with the result that when players went past round 99, the counter went back to level 0. What players then encountered was a glitched stage where ducks randomly teleport across the screen or would just fail to appear, resulting in an automatic failure. This continues until the player has a game left and must reset. What makes this kill screen particularly painful is the infamous duck hunting dog constantly laughs at the player for things beyond their control.
3 Donkey Kong
The original Donkey Kong is rightly remembered as one of the all-time greats of the golden age of arcades. To this day, it is still one of the most competitive highscore games of all time. It is like that because Donkey Kong has the rare trifecta of possessing an extremely high skill ceiling, with tons of ways to earn points, so there’s no way to perfectly optimize how the game is played and with an ending. This last point is especially important, because without it, getting a high score would be as much a test of endurance as it is of skill, as a single game session could potentially last for days.
As you would expect from a game from that era, the fact that Donkey Kong has an ending is not intentional, but because of a bug. Again, the culprit is 8-bit integer overflow. The game calculates how much time the player has to complete a particular stage by multiplying the level number by 10. This means that when players reach the 22nd level, the game determines that the player must have 260 seconds to complete the stage. However, as mentioned before, unsigned 8-bit variables can be up to 255 before the counter reaches zero. This means that players have only 4 seconds to complete the stage, far too little for even the most experienced players.
2 Dig Dug
Although not as well known as the likes of Pac-Man or frogger, Dig Dug was a staple of early 80s arcades that are still loved to this day. The game had players dig tunnels and kill monsters by using a bicycle pump to blow up enemies until they burst. A strange premise to be sure, but one that made for a lot of fun gameplay.
But as all good things must come to an end, Dig Dug is yet another victim of 8-bit integer overflow. When players reach level 256, the counter drops to 0. The game uses the level counter to determine how to lay out the stage, but at round 0, the game doesn’t know where to place objects and enemies. The result of this is that an enemy spawns directly on top of the player at the start of each round, causing immediate death. This continues until the player runs out of lives and has a game left.
1 Tetris
Tetris for NES is actually quite a unique case as it actually has two kill screens. The first occurs when the difficulty increases to level 29. This is because at that point the blocks fall too fast for players to move them all the way to the left or right of the screen. This makes it impossible to clear more lines and progress. Or at least that was the case until February 15, 2019, when Tetris player Joseph Saelee was able to get past level 29 and continue. This was accomplished using a high-level technique called hypertapping, which allows for more controller input than would normally be possible. This was the first time this had been achieved in nearly 30 years since the game was released.
However, if a player can continue past this point, there is still a kill screen that crashes the game after clearing about 1550 lines. This is due to the increasing complexity of the score calculations that take place. The game is coded in such a way that every line that is cleared increases the computing power of the game and slows down the entire game. Because the game is designed to run at 60 fps if each frame takes longer than 1/60th of a second before the game crashes, causing the game to reset or freeze.
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