After 44 years, Donkey Kong player discovers that the legendary kill screen isn't really the end

gamesradar.com:

For the better part of 44 years, Nintendo's 1981 arcade classic Donkey Kong was understood to have a single, definitive endpoint: a "kill screen" where a bug ensures that Mario will inevitably die before you can complete the level. But now speedrunner Kosmic has figured out that this supposed kill screen doesn't have to be the end.

The original arcade version of Donkey Kong takes place across four stages that loop in various configurations of increasing difficulty. Those loops are displayed in-game as levels, and once you reach level five the difficulty has essentially peaked - you just keep repeating the same loop over and over again.

Excellent Donkey Kong players register their high scores in level 22, which is where the kill screen occurs. The bonus score timer overflows - Kosmic's video below goes into much more detail on how this bug works - leaving you with just a few seconds to clear the stage. That's not nearly enough time to get Mario to the top of the screen, so you simply die here over and over until you run out of lives.

The kill screen occurs on the barrel stage, which requires you to climb up a bunch of ladders and run across several slanted girders to reach the end. But there's actually another path to the end - an absurdly precise trick that lets you take advantage of a glitch to climb up a broken ladder all the way to the top of the stage.

Players theorized that this ladder glitch could be used to beat the kill screen stage before the timer runs out as far back as 2013, but the timer still wasn't quite long enough to let you beat the stage, even when creating what amounted to a tool-assisted speedrun. But Kosmic wasn't aware of that fact when he started testing the theory, and his own TAS worked. He climbed up the glitched ladder and beat the kill screen.

What changed between 2013 and 2025? Nothing more than simple chance. Donkey Kong's timer isn't actually a consistent clock, as it instead ticks down each time the titular gorilla rolls a barrel at