Classic video games were designed with extremely tight memory constraints, which means that programmers couldn't spare any lines of code for elaborate endgames that very few players would ever see. Unlike the modern style of video game, which either goes on forever -- ramping up the difficulty at constant intervals -- or presents some kind of reward to the talented player in the form of a boss battle or clever credits screen, games from the 1980s would just... end. Stop.

"Kill screen" is what classic gamers call the moment that the programming breaks down, where the player is presented with either a blank screen, a forest of random symbols, or some other kind of erratic game behaviour. The look of a given game's kill screen can't always be predicted, even by its programmers. The only way to find it is to play the game until it doesn't let you play any more. As a result, kill screens are elusive creatures: a mistake made, say, thirty hours into a Pac-Man session means that you'll have to start over from the beginning before seeing the endgame.

In his article on Billy Mitchell, the self-styled "best video game player in the world," Joshuah Bearman meditates upon the broader significance of the kill screen. For him, the varieties of ways in which oldschool games would break down take on an almost religious significance:

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. In Burgertime, Billy says, the kill screen came at level 28, which he describes as the most chaotic moment he has ever experienced. The fried egg and hot dog and pickles chased him around so aggressively that Billy took it as a cruelly encoded joke.

Pac-Man in particular seems to invite a kind of philosophizing about the possible existence of gateways into worlds beyond this one:

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?

Theories about how kill screens work seem to dovetail with theories about the best way to play video games, which in turn sometimes feel like commentaries about broader existential questions. In his article, Bearman creates a compelling narrative about the positivist, rationalist theories of gaming developed by Billy Mitchell and his cadre of "professional" gamers. "They entered the world of Pac-Man precisely because it could be understood and therefore controlled," he writes. "Pac-Man offered an escape from messy adolescence into a perfect world of forms." When an immigrant construction worker named Abdner Bancroft Ashman is "discovered" by the group (one of Mitchell's friends finds inexplicably high scores on a machine in New York and scopes it out until the mystery player is revealed), tensions rise as his "mystical" connection with the game clashes with the maps and schematics that Billy's group have spent years creating and analyzing. Bearman suggests, though he does not say in so many words, that social (particularly racial) tensions might underlie these conflicting theories of gameplay.

According to Bearman, even non-gamers might be inspired to think in new ways about the unknown when considering the kill screen. There is something almost Gödelian about a game, originally programmed with scant computer resources, somehow creating such unpredictable results before (or instead of) completing the story it tells.

As with Pac-Man, the Ms. Pac-Man kill screen is an area of deep controversy. Usually, the game just stops and goes blank. Occasionally, however, between one and eight additional levels will materialize, seemingly at random. Out there, the game breaks down, like the laws of physics in a black hole. There are upside-down mazes, blank boards, invisible ghosts. It was there, Billy told me in Florida, that he saw Pokey turn into Ms. Pac- Man herself, a disturbing collision of antipodes. "If I didn't have pictures you wouldn't believe it," he said. "You're somewhere you're not supposed to be."

Joshuah Bearman, "The Perfect Game: Five years with the master of Pac-Man," in Harper's, July 2008, pp. 65-73.