Donkey Kong's Famed Kill Screen Has Been Cleared For the First Time

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: If you watched the 2007 documentary King of Kong or followed the controversy surrounding score-chaser Billy Mitchell, you know all about Donkey Kong's famous kill screen. For over four decades, no one was able to pass the game's 117th screen (aka level 22-1) due to a glitch in the game's bonus timer that kills Mario well before he can reach the top of the stage's girders. That was true until last weekend, when Mario speedrunner Kosmic shared the news that he had passed the kill screen using a combination of frame-perfect emulator inputs, a well-known ladder movement glitch, and a bit of luck. And even though Kosmic's trick is functionally impossible to pull off with human reflexes on real hardware, the method shows how the game's seemingly insurmountable kill screen actually can be overcome without modifying the code on an official Donkey Kong arcade board.

AI taking over

[Registered Coward v2]

First the programmers and now the gamers; All your base are belong to us

Re: AI taking over

[Tomahawk]

Ay? There was no AI used here...

Re: Question

[godrik]

It's mostly a tool assisted speedrun. kosmic has a video on his youtube channel where he explains it.

an official Donkey Kong joystick will not allow th

[Joe_Dragon]

an official Donkey Kong joystick will not allow this to happen.

maybe if you wire in buttons to the joystick inputs but that is not allowed under TG rules.

Re:

[rsilvergun]

I don't know didn't seem to stop Billy Mitchell... Oops I might get sued. /s

Re:

[Moryath]

an official Donkey Kong joystick will not allow this to happen.

Why would you think that? The glitch CAN be done by a human. The video even includes recording of a human trying to do it on real hardware, to explain why it likely will never happen in a world-record attempt in real life.

No illegal (diagonal) inputs of the kind that Fraud Billy Mitchell had at his disposal on his faked scores are required.

What's required for the ladder movement trick is a five-frame sequence of up and down inputs, repeat

Re:

[Joe_Dragon]

Billy does not need an pardon he not in lockup and even won some of the court cases.

Re:

[rsilvergun]

Won is subjective there. What he actually did was exhaust the people he was suing economically so they settled with him. Having seen the evidence it's painfully obvious he cheated. He was playing on mame in one case and in the other we can tell from the picture he took that he wasn't using the official joystick and instead was using one that would allow him to do things that are normally impossible.

But our justice system these days is really just a vending machine the two people keep pumping quarters in

Re:

[Chris Mattern]

He can't pardon Billy Carter; he died over 25 years ago.

Re:

[ArchieBunker]

Give his payment time to make it to the blockchain.

back in 2007 someone modded the rom to fix it

[Joe_Dragon]

http://donhodges.com/How_high_... [donhodges.com]

functionally impossible to pull off with human ref

[mukundajohnson]

challenge accepted

Re: Unlistenable

[BadgerStork]

Think of it as shorthand for "do you know what I mean?"

"Do you remember that?"

only 2 games i rolled the credits on

[FudRucker]

that was Metroid on a Nintendo64 and GTA Vice City on a PS2

Re:

[Baron_Yam]

A lot of older games were never-ending, they just sped them up until they hit the machine's limit. I once played Dig Dug until I gave up in boredom, because if you got to a certain point you couldn't help but gain enough points (they scaled with the level number) to get a spare life or finish the level before you'd get killed. I suppose if I'd held on long enough there'd have been a buffer overflow, but that's not the same as an end credit screen.

Not sure what console that was on, it wasn't mine, probabl

It can be done by a real human,

[TronNerd82]

Just get Cowboy Neal to take a crack at it, you'll see.