The Video Game Critic

I was just recently thinking about this. Obv this is directed towards classic games as all modern console games have an end. Pac Man ends on the 256th level. Do Missille Command, Ateroids and Berzerk have endings? Or do they just keep going on forever until you succumb. I am curious about which games just never end. Thoughts?

Food Fight for the Atari 7800 stopped increasing levels after 120- something. It will change the level layout every time after, but the number will stay the same. I played that last level about 50 more times as a kid thinking there might be a secret level. I was expecting my Nintendo ending.

matmico399 wrote:I was just recently thinking about this. Obv this is directed towards classic games as all modern console games have an end. Pac Man ends on the 256th level. Do Missille Command, Ateroids and Berzerk have endings? Or do they just keep going on forever until you succumb. I am curious about which games just never end. Thoughts?

What's funny is how long it took for the Pac Man kill screen to be discovered. I am not sure when, but I think is was well after the heyday of Pac Man and the '83 crash. I don't recall any books or magazine articles that talk about it, and certainly had no effect on its popularity. It takes a true master to ever see this in nature.

These games were meant to be endless, but really meant to just be unwinnable at some point. For Pac Man and Donkey Kong, its an overflow related to 2^8=256. For Pac Man, its the 256th level, for Donkey Kong its a timer based on the level, with the timer rolling over at 256 leaving a comically short amount of time to beat the level.

I would guess many classic arcade game have a register overflow at some point.

There's actually an NES game that relies on a killscreen rather than an actual ending, and that is the classic Duck Hunt. If you manage to beat level 99, you'll come across level 0 where ducks either flicker across the screen making them darn-near impossible to hit or simply fail to appear at all. If you had the reflexes of a Jedi master, a ninja, and Sonic the Hedgehog combined, you still wouldn't make it.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AjUpe7Oh1j0