Why old arcade games amuse me greatly.

My first official post in a good long while is about Pac-Man. How sad is that? Not some up-and-coming ingenue in the art world or photos of a celebrated Japanese fashion designer's newest runway show.

No, bloody Pac-Man.

Actually, it's not really about Pac-Man. It's about old video games in general, "kill screens" in specific.

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.

That's right, I quote from Wikipedia. I couldn't be bothered to find any esoteric literary criticisms of the subject to increase my artistic blogger street cred, so the Wiki will have to do.

The Wiki article then goes on to say that programmers didn't even bother to program additional levels once they hit a certain stage (usually around the 256th level. Maybe 265 is some sort of enigmatic number that represents the apocalypse? I bet it was all deliberate, to warn us ignorant gamers of the upcoming end of the world). They didn't think anyone would be bored enough to play through hundreds of levels of a video game, so they started to become a bit lax on coding the later levels. Therefore, that means the "final" level of Pac-Man looks like this:


There are all sorts of kooky schemes discussed on the Internet pertaining to how to overcome this infamous "split screen level", and people devote meticulous, extremely confusing websites on how to create a patch to fix this level. But in the end, the level counter still resets to zero.

I'm not sure why I find all of this so amusing. It's not because I'm amazed by the legions of gamers who have dedicated their life's work to fixing an essentially unfixable bug in an arcade game.

No, it's because I keep imagining the poor original programmers of Pac-Man, possibly a single man whose life was shattered by this pie-shaped yellow creature that eats dots. Holed up in his cubicle surrounded by hundreds of pages of code, he slowly goes mad from staring at nothing but white numbers on a black screen all day and night, until he finally screams "I CAN'T FUCKING DO THIS ANY MORE!" Frothing at the mouth, he finishes one last half of a Pac-Man level haphazardly before knocking over his chair and running out of his office shrieking to locations unknown, never to be seen again.

Expect updates to come at a much more regular pace, now that I may or may not have my groove back.