A closer look
Pac-Man was designed to be endless, but a severe integer overflow bug in the original arcade cabinet's code makes the 256th level physically impossible to beat. Because the 8-bit processor could only count up to 255, reaching level 256 causes the right half of the screen to erupt into a chaotic mess of random letters and numbers, permanently ending the game. It is a beautiful metaphor for life, really, since no matter how many ghosts you successfully consume or how perfectly you navigate the maze of your daily existence, the universe will eventually just run out of memory and hit you with an insurmountable wall of total algorithmic garbage from which there is absolutely no escape or possibility of winning
