Billy Mitchell and modern arcade scholars obsessively chased the infamous Donkey Kong kill screen where a catastrophic integer overflow in the game code inherently guarantees…

A closer look

You know a game is incredibly well-designed when playing it too perfectly literally breaks the fabric of its reality. Programmers in the 1980s never assumed anyone would actually be insane enough to reach Level 22, so they didn't allocate enough memory for the game's timer. Reaching this fabled 'kill screen'—where the game physically commits suicide by instantly killing the player—became the ultimate holy grail for competitive retro gamers with an alarming amount of free time.