Kill Screens

Here's another little Hobart Games Issue extra for readers. Joshuah Bearman wrote a really fantastic article for Harper's Magazine about classic gaming. (Some of the material he gathered ended up in the documentary King of Kong.)

In the article, he talked a little bit about a classic videogame phenomenon called a "kill screen." I was curious to know more, and interviewed him on the subject. Here it is, a little bit late, after the jump.

—Matthew

Kill Screens: a discussion with Joshuah Bearman


So, what's a "kill screen?"

A "kill screen" is a point in old videos games, which had limited amounts of memory, where the program just eventually runs out of code. It doesn't know how to proceed, and so the game essentially ends. Players discovered when these old games came out—Pac-man and Dig Dug and Donkey Kong and Mr. Do's Castle, that whole era—certain players got really good on certain games and discovered at a point the games were ending. And then they coined the term "kill screen" for that phenomenon.

And these weren't something that the designers intended, it was just a weakness, or a function of the limited memory available to the designers at the time, right?

Yeah. It's an artifact of the chip size and the programming. Definately it was not intended. In fact, the programmers did not expect anybody to get that far. Pac-Man, for example ends at level 256. Nobody programming Pac-Man—or really, there was just one programmer for Pac-Man—but, nobody at Namco or on the Pac-Man team thought that anybody would ever get that good. In fact, a lot of programmers of those types of games always talk about how when they were testing them, they sort of figured that the programmer tended to be pretty good at the game, so they thought, you know, they made the game, so they would be the best at it when they were testing it, and then the game would be out, and within a week, some thirteen year old had eclipsed what the programmer's best score was by a factor of ten or a hundred. So it wasn't very long, actually, before the end of Pac-Man was discovered. I think it was actually within the year that it came out.

So they never expected that people would be that obsessive about playing it? Did they figure that these were minor distractions when they were moved into the arcades or the pizza places or wherever they were?

Well, they knew people would play them, and they knew that people would play them a lot. They were designed as commercial devices. But they were kind of just designed to get your quarters. They're not really designed to be a long term puzzle challenge to an enterprising, obsessive teenager. And they were programmed by adults who really did not comprehend how much players would become engaged with the game at all. They were totally shocked. The guy who created Defender, Eugene Jarvis, when that went out, he had the high score, and they thought he would have it forever, and then within like a week there were kids who could play Defender forever. Defender rolls over, it has no kill screen. It was written in such a way that it would begin again.

And if Pac-Man rolled over, Billy Mitchell would be able to play forever.

So then, since Defender rolls over, is there an official high score?

On the default setting, you can basically marathon on it, and that becomes the measure of your game playing ability—how long you can play. And so there was some kid who played Defender—and all those games. Centipede is another you can marathon on. Star Wars. And people have played those games for 40, 50 hours.

With Star Wars, do you mean the vector graphics game?

Yeah, the vector graphics game with the yolk. Robert Mruczek, this guy in New York City, played Star Wars for 48 hours straight in 1984. And then a couple of years ago in Oregon a guy revived interest in Star Wars marathoning, and he played it, I think, for 46 hours.

I remember in high school having a friend who could play his Atari 2600 Asteroids forever.

Todd Rogers, who I think has the most records if you include the Atari home games, can marathon on the Journey: Escape Atari game, and he has played that game for some inhuman amount of time. Like 80 plus hours.

I would think less than half an hour on that would be inhuman.

And it's the same thing over and over. There is absolutely no reason other than to test your ability to withstand the punishment of sitting in one place handling a joystick for 80 hours listening to an eight tone version of "Wheel in the Sky".

[See this article for more on Rogers.]

There were only a few game, though, that had kill screens?

Yeah, and I actually don't know what the comprehensive list is. Someone probably has it. Pac-Man is the main one because Pac-Man was such a big phenomenon and because Billy Mitchell—who has some celebrity in the classic gaming circuit—was the first person to get to the kill screen and play the game perfect to that point. Ms. Pac-Man also has a kill screen. Dig-Dug has a kill screen. Burger Time has a kill screen. I think Circus Charlie has a kill screen. Pengo. I think Popeye has a kill screen.

Oh, and Donkey Kong.

Donkey Kong and Pac-Man have very defined kill screens. Ms. Pac-Man's kill screen and Burger Time's kill screen are sort of these nebulous zones. Ms. Pac-Man's kill screen comes after the same number of levels every time, but what happens from that point forward is a matter of chance. What exactly the nature of the program failure is changes. On Pac-Man, at level 256 you get half of a screen disappearing under all these bizarre symbols. You can see the maze on the left side, and on the right side it's just this column of symbols (kind of like the Matrix). But you can still play the level, and under the symbols there are dots—points—hidden underneath there. And because there's no border, no maze to keep you from going off the edge of the screen, you can go off the edge. You can take Pac-Man off into this undefined space that the programmer never intended.

It's written into the rules that Pac-Man can wrap around in tunnells, but when the walls aren't there because of the kill screen, all the sudden that rule yields to this spontaneously generated space that you can go off into, and so a lot of players got all mystical. A mystical curiousity took over. Like, what else is out there beyond the kill screen? What can we find?

Like 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Yeah, can you break through the wall?

And the answer seems to be no. People like Billy Mitchell have looked at the code to figure out if it says anything. Are there any clues in there? And I think the answer is no, but with Ms. Pac-Man, it happens at the same time, but sometimes the screens are upside down, and you can still play it like the old maze, but you navigate it upside down. And it's difficult because it becomes these nested layers of mazes. And only two or three people can navigate it. Sometimes it's blank. Sometimes your character turns into other characters. Sometimes the ghosts turn into other characters. It gets crazy.

Sometimes there will be more mazes. You can complete the kill screen and get more mazes. More points to be had. A rich bounty.

It can be up to eight. Eight is the most anyone has ever seen. It's this special, rare moment where the doorway opens, and you have this rare opportunity, and it happens very seldom. So you're lucky if you see that.

Now, games are more narrative and cinematic, and instead of kill screens, we have cut scenes. (I guess there were always cut scenes in games like, say, Ms. Pac-Man—places where the game takes over.) But now they are much more elaborate. Do you think we've lost anything by losing kill screens? Metaphysically speaking?

Yeah, I mean, there is something compelling about the idea that not even the programs know what's going to happen in the conclusion. Now the gaming experience is somewhat defined. Of course, the breakthrough games now are all about trying to escape the conventions of the gameplay in some way, either socially—like interacting online with World's of Warcraft—or like Grand Theft Auto where there's this open environment where you don't necessarily have to do some things. But still, the games don't have the glitches. Even after kill screens, there were still weird glitches.

Games are now produced on a vaster, grander, high-production scale, they're so thoroughly vetted, there's no opportunity to fall between the cracks.

It's a trade-off, obviously. The old games don't have the unintended consequences of, say, what happened to the economincs of the online community in World of Warcraft. A different kind of thing, but equally interesting.

Finding the kill screen was a personal quest, an intimate endeavor. I mean, you'd play with your buddy, and you could go to the arcade, and you could share tips but your still playing you against Pac-Man. Man versus machine. Ultimately you are playing against yourself, seeing what you can do. And that's what the purists still devoted to these games say is missing from the modern games. The experience is diffused into all these different ways to play. It used to be one man, one quarter, and the program. The code. You would have one shot.

It was more like performing. Like being at the Olympics or something.

They all talk about how that era ended when Punch-Out came along. That was the first game where you could put in a quarter and press continue. (Though, some say it was Moon Patrol. I haven't really sorted out which one it was.)

And then it ceased to be a test of will or skill. It wasn't summiting Everest. If you were Hilary, and you didn't quite make it to the top, you could put in another quarter, and get a little bit farther. And if you had a whole roll of quarters, you could make it. No challenge in that.

UPDATE: Blake Butler mentioned kill screens on Youtube. I'll embed some. Good idea, Blake.

Some of these look to be MAME kill screens instead of arcade kill screens. They are for informational use only.

Comments

[blake]

really nice, i wish i were good at these games, you tube has some nice kill screen footage i am scared

[Chris]

I missed out on most of the arcade mania of the 80s (though there was a day of Street Fighter at the Skating Rink that for me, at least, will live forever). But my friends and I have talked on occasion about how relatively easy games have become. How, just like with putting in more and more quarters, games allow you to quick save your way past pretty much any obstacle. In the old days, like Contra, you had three lives and that was it*. You die on the last level, too bad, start over. Did cause a lot of controllers to get thrown across the room, though. Not that I ever did that.

*Well, unless you cheated of course.

[Dan Wickett]

"some celebrity"???? Billy Mitchell has waaaaaay more than 'some' celebrity in the classic gaming circuit. At least that's what Aaron Burch says.

[Darby]

I think even more than having the ability to insert more quarters to continue games is the ability, with home consoles, to save progress, and go to sleep, and pick it up again tomorrow where you left off.

Games have become more like Second Life, where they are trying to appeal to that part of the brain that wants to walk around in different kind of atmosphere and control things.

There are some interesting 2D puzzle games coming out of Japan for the newer consoles that are more like the old games, where it's basically how quickly and precisely you can move your fingers around a controller, like Octomania. They tend not to cost very much because all the 'gamers' think they are crap.

[parker]

the pac man kill screen, where you can go off into space the designer never intended, reminds me of danielewski's house of leaves...the house bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

i used to think i was good at video games. but until now, i never knew what a kill screen was. guess i wasn't very good after all.

[parker]

the pac man kill screen, where you can go off into space the designer never intended, reminds me of danielewski's house of leaves...the house bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

i used to think i was good at video games. but until now, i never knew what a kill screen was. guess i wasn't very good after all.

[parker]

the pac man kill screen, where you can go off into space the designer never intended, reminds me of danielewski's house of leaves...the house bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

i used to think i was good at video games. but until now, i never knew what a kill screen was. guess i wasn't very good after all.