Twin Galaxies recently interviewed and profiled Frank Breneman, who in the early 1980s clocked in a record-breaking 3,149,120 high score on Pac-Man. The article is part of a series from Twin Galaxies marking the 40th anniversary of the historic video game. (Of course, this also happens to be the 40th anniversary of Frank and his wife Carol.)
Regarding that summer day in 1982, a mere 12 days before his wife gave birth to their first child, Franks said: “The score kept getting higher and higher and I wasn’t losing any lives.”
The article continued: “By the four-hour mark, he pushed the score over three million points with two lives in reserve. By this point, Carol knew there was no turning back. “I was in it for the long haul no matter how long it took, unless I went into labor.”
Then Frank cleared a level, the screen ended up only half visible, and that was that.
“In a 1982 interview with the Charlotte Observer, Frank surmised that a malfunction was probably the culprit leading to the premature end to his game. “The machine got hot, I guess,” he said at the time.
“Years later, he realized that the half-screen wasn’t the result of overheating but was actually the famous killscreen that ends the game on Level 256. His interview, in turn, serves as one of the earliest published accounts of this game-ending event.” Read the full article at www.twingalaxies.com.