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Comment by tenebrisalietum | Hacker News Reader

It's an achieveable ending--one not planned by the coders, but one nonetheless. You cannot play past that point.

A couple of old arcade games have "kill screens", such as Pacman and Donkey Kong.

Because of the specifics of how this is done you actually can play past this point, but you have to intentionally dodge the crash and the conditions for the crash can be different per level.

It is technically possible to go up through level 255 at which point it loops back to 0. It's been done through a tool assisted run (carefully doing inputs frame by frame rather than playing in real time)

In this case, he even intentionally intentionally triggered the crash. As cool an achievement this is, I struggle to call it "beating" the game, since players could still theoretically go much further. Given that the glitch is predictable and well-documented, I'd consider it to be yet another (and new) obstacle to overcome, not the end. This is therefore the first time someone's ever hit the obstacle, and the first time someone's ever passed it (since he missed his first chance at glitching and had to take the second).

All that said, I feel a bit weird telling a community I don't belong to that they're incorrectly enjoying a game I don't play.

The game is man vs machine. The machine fills the space with blocks; the human clears space for the blocks. The machine wins when the human fails to make room for the next block. The human wins when the machine fails to deliver the next block.

this comment is fantastic and gives a clear answer to anyone griping about whether this is considered "beating" the game. scruti is the first human to beat the game, now other people will try to beat it in other ways on other levels.

My understanding is that it's a bit of a roll of the dice exactly when the kill screen appears, so in theory you could continue playing longer. I suppose the significance, then, is that it's the first time that someone has played the game and not lost.

i reached the kill screen on Demon Attack on Atari as a kid. It was highlight of my early life

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