What is a Kill Screen?
A kill screen is a major error that occurs in a video game and usually causes further progress in the game to be halted. This error is usually due to a programming error or a design oversight and will cause the game to freeze, crash or simply become unplayable. Kill screens are usually associated with classic video games such as Pac-Man or Donkey Kong, which are from the Golden Age of Arcade Games. Probably the most infamous kill screen is in the arcade game of Pac-Man. When the player reaches the 256th level of the game, the right hand side of the screen is replaced by random symbols and letters, and the game begins to act too erratically to play further. The reason this happens is that within the programming of the game, there is an 8-bit level counter. Since it is 8-bit, it can only possibly contain 255 distinct values, and the 256th value causes the game to crash. This phenomenon is known as integer overflow. Integer overflow is not necessarily the only cause for the kill screen to
I can’t directly link you but you can easily find the documentary online. The kill screen is weird, because the real old school arcade games didn’t have enough memory for a final level. Donkey Kong was unique in that you could actually play the kill screen for like 10-15 seconds before you just died randomly.
