Below, an analysis of the split-screen bug in the original Pac-Man.
What I love most about this is that the board is broken, unplayable, but “…through additional analysis, it has been revealed what happens should the 256th level be cleared.”
In this, you feel the sense of Pac-Man’s quasi-mystical power, a set of patterns and systems that can — with dedication and effort — be decoded, deciphered, used to arrive at some empirical truth. I think of kabbalah, conspiracy, the LHR, the human genome. And of course, The Truth.
Here in the 256th level of Pac-Man, that meaning lies, somehow, beyond the code (“if it were possible to do this, this is what would happen…”) If the code has bugs, then it’s not just reading code. It’s looking for some legible underlying intention underneath the code.
It’s not decompiling code. It’s deciphering the meaning that lives beyond it, even where the code falls. Believing in systems, seeking them out, and learning, in part, from where those systems fail.
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“Pac-Man supposedly has no ending—as long as the player keeps at least one life, he or she should be able to continue playing indefinitely. However, this is rendered impossible by a bug. Normally, no more than seven fruits are displayed on the side of the screen at any one time, but when the internal level counter (stored in a single byte) reaches 255, the subroutine erroneously causes this value to “roll over” to zero before drawing the fruit. This causes the routine to attempt to draw 256 fruits, which corrupts the bottom of the screen and the whole right half of the maze with seemingly random symbols, making the level unwinnable. However, through additional analysis, it has been revealed what happens should the 256th level be cleared - the fruits and intermissions would restart from level 1 conditions, but the enemies would retain their higher speed and invulnerability to power pellets from the higher stages.”
Don Hodges, excerpted in wikipedia.
