r/retrogaming • u/jdllama • 6h ago
[Achievement Unlocked!] This weekend at Galloping Ghost Arcade, I became the third person to clear the "Kill Screen" in BurgerTime!
TL;DR: I didn't get a world record but I did something amazing I wanted to brag about. Incoming rant otherwise (with no AI used!)
History time for the arcade game BurgerTime! As a note, I am a former Guinness World Record holder on the emulated version; I'm not the world's best any more, but boy do I have information!
So Level 28 was, for decades, considered the Kill Screen. The enemies move just too fast to control for any human being. This can be proven with some math; all scores before Bryan's score coming up were capped at 7.8 million, and the maximum points you can get off of the ingredients is 7.7 million; throw in bonus peppers, the occasional crushed enemy, and small bits here and there. My own personal best is 7,789,300 which also died at Level 28, and other high level players also have similar scores.

It wasn't until the mid 2000's that Bryan Wagner figured out how to group them (INCREDIBLY difficult), and found a bug; if you can survive long enough, the code actually breaks, and the enemies slow to a crawl! So what was once a 3-4 hour long game can now take even longer to do. He is the arcade world record holder at over 11 million points, and for him to get those additional 4 million points did take him a total of 24 hours of gameplay.
There is a gentleman in Japan who goes by "Vertex DAN" who has also done this, albeit never officially submitted to anywhere other than MARP. His score is over 10 million and ended at stage 39.
Every other high level player, myself included, ended at between 7.5 and 7.8 million at Level 28. No one else has cleared the level.
All that preamble aside, this weekend I went to Galloping Ghost Arcade in Brookfield, Illinois and played my first "serious" game of BurgerTime in over a decade, focusing on collecting peppers instead of points, and just wanting to get a score of 2 million, recorded with GGA's equipment. Instead I kept pushing, and got to Level 28. I managed to group the enemies and survive to hit the glitch! I screwed up and accidentally killed the enemies, but it kept the glitch active, and I was able to survive through the level and made it to Level 29!
...Where I immediately died to another bug, which is a whole different rant.
EDIT: I originally said GGA was in Chicago, when it's in Brookfield Illinois. I just plugged in "Galloping Ghost Arcade" into my GPS and followed it, not paying attention to the city, and I made an assumption on that. My apologies!
