What are kill screens?

What happened when you completed an early arcade game?  Did they even have an ending?  Did Jump Man (AKA Mario) ever rescue Pauline from Donkey Kong?  Did Frogger finally get home?  Were the Galaxians ever thwarted? The answer, I'm afraid, is no. The truth, however, was only ever revealed to players with the skill and patients of demi-Gods, because in most cases you had to play through hundreds of screens to get to the "end" - and let's be honest, even getting past the first dozen screens on Pac-Man is impressive.  So what did happen?  Quite simply, the game broke, like this:

This is a 'kill screen' and in the case of Pac-Man it occurs on level 256.  When games like Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Donkey Kong and Galaga were originally developed, nobody expected players to play for that long.  So kill screens are little more than bugs, often caused by integer overflows on the level counter.

Back in the day, I never heard anybody talk about kill screens.  The first I heard of them was when I watched arcade championship documentary King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.  For top arcade gamers, reaching a kill screen is the Holy Grail and the only way to "beat" these old games.

MTW