What was the name of the Ft. Lauderdale arcade shown in King of Kong? I pass by it all the time but I think it’s shut down now.
So I went googling … is a Donkey Kong kill screen just some sort of bug where it arbitrarily kills you?
yeah:
A kill screen is a stage or level in a video game (often an arcade game) that stops the player’s progress due to a programming error or design oversight. Rather than “ending” in a traditional sense, the game will crash, freeze, or behave so erratically that further play is impossible.
Kill screens were much more common during the Golden Age of Arcade Games. Games from this era were often written with the assumption that the player would stop playing long before the numerical limits of the game code were reached; most games from this period were intended to continue until the players lost all of their lives. Additionally, the limited hardware of these early machines often meant that programmers could not spend memory on logical checks of the state of the game.
Pretty much. After a specific number of stages there’s some kind of overflow bug that causes you to die a few seconds after the stage begins, so it’s impossible to proceed past that point. The trick to getting high scores is to maximize your point-scoring opportunities before that point, rather than simply lasting as long as possible.
Specifically, for Donkey Kong:
Rom hackers have gotten in and fixed this bug, by simply capping the bonus counter at the max value, which lets the game be played forever.
Think of it as an orgasm.