Yes, I completely understand that those games that ran on a shoestring can easily crash when some values are exceeded. What puzzles me is that I would have expected the player to be annoyed at his game crashing (of course simpler games on dedicated hardware didn’t really get to crash all that much back then, so maybe that was seen as an achievement of sorts).
I suppose it’s my lack of exposure to the console side of things, having gone from 8 bit PCs to the ubiquitous intel machines without ever using one of the dedicated gaming devices.
There’s been a moving concept of the ‘killscreen’ in tetris. Pacman has a limit where the game isn’t any longer playable. Tetris only got to a certain speed and was too fast to progress until new tech for hitting buttons were discovered. Recently, someone found out that after a certain level some conditions would crash the game so people have been racing to meet those conditions.
Tetris doesn’t really have an end. It just keeps going. So this is a very specific crash where if you get far enough into the game, it can’t keep up with the player any more. You “beat” Tetris by playing so well you make the game break.
This is similar to getting pacman to crash by beating level 255 at which point incrementing the level goes past what can be stored and the data gets corrupted.
