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The Last Record Holders – Pac Man and the Kill Screen

JA September 17

The July issue of Harpers, which is now up online, has a great feature on classic gaming record holders by Joshuah Bearman. Among them is Billy Mitchell, who, among many other titles, became the first person to complete a perfect game of Pac Man in 1999 – eating every possible white dot, energiser, fruit and flashing blue ghost for 256 rounds, resulting in a maximum score of 3 333 360 points.

Most classic gamers came of age in the early Eighties and, like Billy, are now entering their forties. The best of them still practice up to several hours a day to maintain top form, and when they come to break records an audience gathers, just like back in the glory days of the arcade.

Mitchell spent years trying to deconstruct Pac Man’s internal programming, using ‘stopwatches, video cameras, notepads, and sometimes even transparencies taped to the screen’ to work out the behaviour of the Pac Man ghosts named, Snow-White like, Speedy, Bashful, Shadow and Pokey. The key to his record was predictability and maze planning, and above all not giving in to panic.

Something else that stuck out were the descriptions of the ‘kill screen’, a kind of holy grail for gamers and a place where the programming effectively ends:

Pac-Man comes to a halt at level 256, as the program runs out of code and the entire right side of the screen is engulfed by senseless symbols. Circus Charlie just freezes. Donkey Kong ends after five seconds on level 22. The first time Billy reached the impassable final level of Dig Dug, he lost all 400 of his free men. Then there is Galaga, which eventually closes in solitude. After everything comes nothing: No enemy armada. No music. No score. Just you and the existential void. Other games end in violence.

… With Pac-Man, there has always been a powerful appeal surrounding the notion of “The Doorway”—a prospective passageway to the other side, a way past level 256. There are hints right at the threshold. As the maze comes undone, the disintegrating edges seem to hint at an unprogrammed but perhaps navigable new space. Equally enticing is that the final prize Pac-Man collects is not a fruit but a key, the last of nine—and why are there keys if there is nothing to unlock?

Pan Man level 256

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Comments

by bob
17 May 11 at 3:02

that'sepic

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by bob
17 May 11 at 3:03

edit-

That’s epic

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by bob
17 May 11 at 3:03

suck my cock

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by moe
17 May 11 at 3:04

Those ghost’s are his bitches

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