kill screen

English

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Noun

kill screen (plural kill screens)

  1. (video games) A level in a computer game that is impossible to win, usually due to programming errors.
    • 2010, Scott Rogers, Level Up!: The Guide to Great Video Game Design, page 48:
      The most famous kill screen from classic gaming is the 256th level of Pac-Man. At this point, due to a bug half the screen becomes garbled data, which keeps the player from collecting all of the dots and clearing the board to move on.
    • 2015, Emily Flynn-Jones, “Don't Forget to Die”, in Torill Elvira Mortensen, Jonas Linderoth, Ashley ML Brown, editors, The Dark Side of Game Play: Controversial Issues in Playful Environments‎[1], Routledge, →ISBN:
      As a type of bug, the death loop is not the only deadly, and deathly, reference to game-halting system failure. There is also the kill screen.
    • 2020, Michelle Herte, Forms and Functions of Endings in Narrative Digital Games, Routledge, →ISBN:
      Kill screens—a problem largely limited to arcade games—occur when an unexpectedly far progress of a player causes an error in the game program.
    • 2024 January 3, Sopan Deb, “Boy, 13, Is Believed to Be the First to ‘Beat’ Tetris”, in The New York Times‎[2], →ISSN:
      Willis got to Level 157, reaching Tetris’s “kill screen,” the point where a video game becomes unplayable because of limitations in its coding. (In the video, when the game freezes, the screen reads that Willis had made it to Level 18. That’s because the code wasn’t designed to advance so high.)
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