Kill Screen

A kill screen is a stage or level in a video game (often an arcade game) that stops the player's progress due to a programming error or design oversight. Rather than "ending" in a traditional sense, the game will crash, freeze, or behave so erratically that further play is extremely hard or even impossible.

Video games, like any other computer software, can suffer from a software bug. A bug in a video game is not automatically a kill screen; to be one, the bug must occur consistently in the same point in the game and must preclude any further play. While almost any type of bug could cause this sort of behavior, the most common cause is simple oversights on the part of the game's programmers such as an integer overflow of the level counter.

Kill screens were much more common during the Golden Age of Arcade Games. Games from this era were often written with the assumption that the player would stop playing long before the numerical limits of the game code were reached; most games from this period were intended to continue until the players lost all of their lives. Additionally, the limited hardware of these early machines often meant that programmers could not spend processor power on logical checks of the game state.