The King of Kong documentary proves that video game scores, and mullets, are a very serious business. Everyone is out to set a new speedrun or some other video game-related record, so it’s hard to keep up sometimes. You can play arcade classics until your thumbs are as thick as your neck and never come close to the masters’ scores, but at least you’ll have a good time doing it. If getting your name etched into the channals of gaming history is your thing, you can aim really high… but there are some video game records that will probably never be broken. Heres a few:
Pac-Man (Arcade) – Turbo Mode Kill Screen
Getting the ultimate Pac-Man perfection is a combination of robotic timing, relentlessness, and some serious patience. Profesional players aim to break the game by reaching the “Kill Screen“. This is a point in the game’s code in which the screen decays into random symbols due to a memory shortage after level 256.
Glitching out Pac-Man is the Grail of competitive retro gaming, only ever reached by only a handful of people legitaly. There are a few modded games and apps floating around online that can start you off with level 256 so that the kill screen can be expieranced, but it’s not the same as earning it the hard way. Good luck trying to hit the Kill Screen in Turbo Mode, which has Pac-Man and the ghosts moving at nearly three times their usual speeds—only two people in history ever reached it the normal hard way.
Why you’ll never beat the Turbo Mode Kill Screen: You simply don’t have enough quarters for the arcade & it would take some serious practice, we are talking daily grinding for years.
Mega Man X-X3 (SNES) – Beaten simultaneously with the same input
Elite Mega Man player “agwawaf” was able to beat Mega Man X, X2, and X3 with 100 percent completion on each game in just 43 minutes and 51 seconds. What the hell, 44 minutes? But Mega Man X was previously beaten in 32 minutes, X2 in 33 minutes, and X3 in 42 minutes.” This was a tool-assisted speedrun that had agwawaf playing all three games at once. On top of that, his controller’s inputs were used across all three games simultaneously. Sure, the runs weren’t perfect and he took damage along the way, but just think of how incredible it is to beat all three games at the same time in just under 44 minutes.