Kill screen taxonomy: Pac-Man 256, Donkey Kong 22-1, Tetris 157

A kill screen is not one thing. The name is a bag, and three famous games put different objects in it.

Pac-Man dies at board 256. The right half of the maze becomes garbage. You can still move. You cannot clear the board under ordinary play.

Donkey Kong dies at level 22-1, the 117th screen. The bonus timer overflows, Mario gets about four seconds, and the clock kills him.

NES Tetris dies somewhere around level 155 to 157, if you are good enough to get there. The game freezes. A hum replaces the music. Inputs do nothing. Willis Gibson, playing as Blue Scuti, was 13 when he hit it on 21 December 2023, at level 157, after 1,511 lines.

Three overflows. Three rooms. Three feelings. If a leaderboard treats them as the same event, the board is lying about what the player did.

Pac-Man 256: the joke that still takes coins

The original arcade Pac-Man stores the round in eight bits. Round 256 is round 0 with the carry set, and the drawing code walks off the map. The right side of the screen fills with sprite tiles and fragments of text. Players call it the split-screen, the map 256 glitch, the kill screen.

The feeling is comic and then grim. The maze you have been living in for six hours becomes a broken advertisement for the hardware. Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde still hunt. The dots that remain on the garbage side are real, if you know where they sit under the junk. Billy Mitchell's perfect 3,333,360, set at Funspot on 3 July 1999, required a no-death run and those leftover pellets. The machine did not stop. The machine became unreadable, and the last points were a memory test.

You do not "beat" Pac-Man 256 in the way a later Donkey Kong player beat 22-1. You survive it long enough to pick the carcass. The run ends because the board cannot be cleared, not because the process dies. A spectator who walks up in the last minute sees a cartoon of a video game and a man still steering.

That is feeling one: the world remains, ruined, and you are still in it.

Donkey Kong 22-1: the clock that hates you

Donkey Kong computes the bonus timer as 10 × (level + 4) and then caps it at 80, meaning 8,000 bonus points and 80 seconds. The two high digits live in an eight-bit register. At level 22 the raw value is 260. 260 minus 256 is 4. The cap never fires, because 4 is under 80. Mario gets 400 bonus, which is a handful of seconds, and the girders are still a full climb.

For 44 years that was the end of the game. Billy Mitchell's 874,300 in November 1982 was, among other things, the first famous arrival at that wall. The King of Kong taught a cinema audience to wait for it. "There's a Donkey Kong kill screen coming up," Steve Wiebe's friends said, and the room leaned in.

The feeling is not comic. You did the work. The barrels were fair. The last screen is not. The machine takes the last life with a timer it computed wrong, and there is no pellet to pick out of the wreckage. You lose.

In February 2025 the speedrunner Kosmic showed that the wall had a door. A broken-ladder trick, four frames down and one frame up, nudges Mario through geometry the timer did not budget for. The kill screen was cleared on original logic, with a glitch, not with a rewrite. Ars Technica wrote it up. The taxonomy has to absorb that: a kill screen can be a death, and later a category.

That is feeling two: the machine kills you on a clock, and for a long time that was the sport.

NES Tetris 157: the crash you came for

NES Tetris does not die at a fixed level. The late game is a minefield of overflow conditions. Level 155 can crash on a single line clear. Blue Scuti reached 155 on a triple, had to keep playing, and the freeze came at 157. The line clear drew. The line count ticked. The pieces stopped. A hum. The controller went dead.

He had been playing for about 40 minutes. Hypertapping and rolling, techniques that did not exist when the cartridge shipped in 1989, had made the kill screen a human problem instead of a TAS poster. aGameScout called it the biggest achievement in 34 years of the classic scene. Tom's Hardware and Ars Technica ran the same sentence in different clothes: Tetris was beaten.

"Beaten" here means the process died. Not a garbage maze. Not a four-second clock. The program stopped being a program. The player wanted that. The crash is the trophy.

A careful enough player, or an AI, might dodge every crash window and roll the level counter past 255, back to 0. The kill screen is a family of deaths, not a door with one number on it. Blue Scuti's 157 is a particular death, on a particular night, in Oklahoma, on a television that would not show the green pieces on levels 146 and 148.

That is feeling three: you came to break the machine, and the machine breaking is the win.

Why a table cannot shrug

A leaderboard that only stores a number erases the ending.

Pac-Man 3,333,360 is a completed harvest on a board that cannot be cleared. Donkey Kong 1,000,000-plus is usually a death at 22-1, unless the row is from after Kosmic and the category allows the ladder. NES Tetris "1511 lines" or "level 157" is a crash. Same English word, kill screen. Three different verbs.

HISCORE already refuses to rank across units. A time is not a point score. unit and dir exist so those numbers never share a column. The kill screen is the next honest field: how the run ended, not only what it scored.

The smallest version that works:

• unit keeps doing its job. Points, lines, level, seconds.
• a flag, optional, set by the game or by the importer, with a short closed list. Something in the shape of end=machine or end=kill or end=crash.
• mode or rules already separate "died at 22-1" from "cleared 22-1 with broken ladder." Do not overload one field with both the sport and the epitaph.

The flag is not verification. A sender can lie about a crash the way a sender can lie about a score. The flag is a label so two honest numbers do not look like the same kind of finished. A spectator reading the board should be able to see that Blue Scuti's run ended because the NES stopped, that Mitchell's Pac-Man ended because board 256 cannot be cleared, that a Donkey Kong million ended because the timer said 4.

We do not need a novel. We need a bit that says: the machine finished the player.

Until that bit exists, every kill-screen row on a mixed table is a small lie of omission. The number is true. The ending is missing. The ending is the thing people remember.

Honesty table

Sources

• Map 256 Glitch, Pac-Man Wiki; Billy Mitchell) on the 3,333,360 construction with Chris Ayra
• Donkey Kong timer: Glitchipedia; Ars Technica on Kosmic, 7 February 2025
• NES Tetris: Ars Technica, 2 January 2024; Tom's Hardware; biggieblog on the 21 December 2023 crash
• HISCORE argument: unit, dir, mode, rules, comparison key

Retrieved 18 August 2026.