44 years after its release, you’d think that the speedrunning community would have pushed the Donkey Kong arcade game to its limit. But, as it turns out, there are a handful of extra levels hidden behind the game’s long-assumed unbeatable kill screen. All you’ve got to do is beat it.
That’s the challenge that was recently undertaken by Super Mario Bros. speedrunner Kosmic. In a 29-minute YouTube video, the Mario pro explains that Donkey Kong’s US arcade release (the one used for competitive play) maxes out at the first barrel stage of level 22. This comes as a product of a glitch in the game’s bonus timer algorithm, where the game will prematurely end after just 400 bonus points have passed — nowhere near long enough to make it all the way to Pauline at the top of the tower.
Now, this was (understandably) assumed to be the game’s natural end, but, inspired by a Discord message from another DK speedrunner, Kosmic worked out that you could hypothetically use another glitch to overcome the premature kill screen — fighting fire with fire, and all that.
The glitch in question is one that allows Mario (the artist formally known as Jumpman) to eternally climb the screen thanks to some coordinate manipulation on a broken ladder. If you could ride this exploit all the way to the top, he’d theoretically make it before the dodgy bonus timer expired.
Booting up the game in an emulator and using frame advance to slow things down for frame-perfect inputs, Kosmic got to work climbing DK’s tower in this weird, floaty manner. And it works.
The speedrunner made it past level 22’s first barrel stage and progressed through a further five stages to get to the 22-6 rivet stage. There are no broken ladders to exploit on this one, so things naturally wrap up after you’ve nabbed six of the eight required rivets and you’re hit with the definitive final kill screen.
You have to get very lucky (like a 1/1024 chance level of lucky), but it is possible. Ah yes, Kosmic also flags that he only managed to do it thanks to the frame advance slowing things down. If you were to try it in real-time, you’d have to move the joystick back and forth 24 times per second, which ain’t happening.
But heck, an additional five screens on a 44-year-old game? That’s a pretty wild discovery. Bring on its 88th anniversary so we can finally see someone hit level 23…