February 13, 2025, 4:19 pm | Read time: 4 minutes

“Donkey Kong” now enjoys genuine cult status – just like its infamous kill screen after what appears to be the last level of the game. One player has now managed to bypass it for the first time.

The Kill Screen in “Donkey Kong”

Starting in the late 1970s, the Japanese company Nintendo began trying to establish a presence in the USA with arcade machines. After initial moderate success, a breakthrough came. The breakthrough came with a game where Jumpman, the precursor to Super Mario, must rescue his girlfriend Pauline from the rooftop of a skyscraper where she’s been kidnapped by Donkey Kong.

The game is divided into levels that take you higher and higher up the building. Theoretically, Donkey Kong goes on like this endlessly unless the hero, Jumpman, loses, in which case the so-called kill screen appears. This occurs either when the level timer expires or Jumpman is hit, resulting in a game over.

Officially, there is no last level in Donkey Kong. However, the record is at level 22-1. Four seconds after the start of the level, the game abruptly stops and shows the kill screen, regardless of how Jumpman is acting and whether there is still time on the clock.

The timer in “Donkey Kong” Explained

The whole thing can be traced back to a bug, which also gave rise to the term “the last level of Donkey Kong.” And since this is a technical error, the bug can only be fixed to a limited extent. Yet, YouTuber Kosmic has now actually succeeded in overcoming it.

In his video, the gamer explains that the bug is due to the game’s 8-bit architecture. The timer is calculated in the background using a formula: (current level x 10) + 40. So, in the first level, the timer ticks 50 times. In the second level, it is then 60, in the third, 70, and so on.

The problem: 8-bit games can only calculate a value up to a maximum of 256. From level 22, however, a value of 260 would be necessary. This also explains the four seconds after which Donkey Kong stops. This corresponds to the difference between 256 and 260. As the game simply starts counting from the beginning in level 22, due to the calculation structure, this results in this enormously short time span. But how did Kosmic manage to complete the level within four seconds?

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Gamer Outsmarts the Game

The surprising truth is that he didn’t. To get around the bug, the YouTuber in the video uses a so-called ladder glitch. A glitch is a software error that leads to display errors in a video game, for example. In the current example, the error occurs between two broken ladders that are not actually intended to be used.

Thanks to a combination in which players press down for four frames and then move up one frame while standing on a section of the ladder, it is still possible to use the ladder and get to the top. If the sequence is repeated often enough, Jumpman will make it to the end of the level.

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What comes after the last level of “Donkey Kong”?

However, this feat requires tremendous skill or the use of an emulator, as Kosmic did. The gamer programmed the emulator accordingly with precise input, which then took over the controls for him.

As mentioned at the beginning, Donkey Kong is theoretically endless. After completing the challenging level within the four-second window, Kosmic was able to continue playing as usual. However, he reached a level that no one had been able to play before him.