The Edge

The Edge

A gentle hum of static and clicks can be heard in the vacant room like soft rain on a distant tin roof. A colored and shifting light projects from a single powered up cathode ray tube onto the back wall. It’s 4:32 am in a dark, dusty arcade, after hours in the suburban part of Hollywood, Florida. Billy Mitchell is mechanically flicking the joystick of Ms. Pac-Man back and fourth in a seeming trance as the lipsticked avatar plods through the maze of the game world; Gobbling up fruits and dots and keys, going invulnerable and devouring ghosts, shifting in near-zero time to make last minute recalculations of the pathing around enemies.

This seems like the thousandth time he has come this far, since he has replayed it in his head so many times, but really it’s only the twelfth. Being so methodical in his approach to this game, as he had done with the original Pac-Man, he is determined not just to see the end of the game but to truly understand it. He aims to comprehend the logic of achieving the highest scores with the most efficiency and repeatability. This is at least one order of magnitude more difficult from the original Pac-Man. Not because of the female version’s, distracting, lascivious curve, but because of a simple 8-bit random factor that compounds some decisions from being purely deterministic to partially based on luck. This maddens him to no end.

The last real levels of the game are quickly approaching, the 133rd level and beyond. He has been waiting hours, making multiple attempts today, to get back to this point and make another foray into the unknown. After level 133 the game starts to break down, the walls break down, the dots disappear, the ghosts move freely, the world spins, a new frontier is born there on the bright, flickering screen. He quickly dispatches the last level and bravely fords onward. Level 134 shows a new twist from last time, in this iteration it is inverted, the maze is upside down. Where he was playing mechanically and listlessly, Billy’s style changes instantly into “explore mode”. He fiddles around the fringes of the level and can tell the map may be inverted on the screen, but the characters are still moving the same way as before. By memory, he navigates the maze, closing his eyes when he is safely away from the ghosts to use his internal mind-maze instead of the inverted trick being displayed to him. He bests this level without a bit of trouble and moves another step closer to the edge.

This really is the Edge, he knows. Inside this massive cabinet is a set of small computer boards populated with TTL chips. The mind of the machine is a single Zilog Z80, 3.6Mhz processor and the code for the game is stored on an array of ROM chips totaling up to 4kb. At the bottom of the games code is 89 bytes of unused space. The company never intended, nor even conceived that anyone could make it this far. The game simply runs off the end of the written memory and resets, sometimes. And the sometimes is the key. Billy is sure of it. Sometimes you get to the Edge instead.

And here it comes. Level 135 spins up and there is no game world at all. The ghosts meander aimlessly, their simple rule set makes no sense when the walls don’t exist and the game cannot judge the relative position of the pieces. A banana flies diagonally across the screen, wrapping around the edge and fantastic speed. Eventually it collides with Ms. Pac-man by accident and pops off an even 5000 points. Billy takes note that he is still interacting with some of the game pieces, though the game world seems to be slowly disintegrating.

He sees points popping up, ten at a time. He must be eating more dots, and there a key, a bigger jump in his score. A key after level 133? That makes no sense to him, but he continues to explore, undeterred. He goes across the map several times, looping straight through the middle, then down a row, then down another row. There certainly are no invisible walls this time, and he is having trouble locating all the dots. Finally with much fiddling he finds the last few in the blankness, avoiding ghosts that are making completely arbitrary navigations. And this is where things start to get weird.

Level 136 is not supposed to be another repetition of the same palette. Under normal circumstances the game would go and retrieve another page from the ROM, neatly encoded in a very efficient, binary manner, but it simply doesn’t exist. The character engine takes over and random sprites now come shooting out. An ampersand is a ghost, or is it a fruit? Random characters, lines, fuzz, all spewing out onto the screen. And that’s when he notices there are two Ms. Pac-Mans. Another avatar has wandered into the world and its moving about as well.

They move towards each other, make a last second dodge when they get too close, as if probing for danger. They both pirouette and then stop… Inch forward, inch backward, stop… They both make these simple maneuvers in turn with each other, but it shows they are both probing each other. Communicating in a language that consists purely of up, down, left, right. Just as the dialogue is about to progress a number sign comes swooping in diagonally and collides with him, it must have been a ghost gone AWOL, spinning out of control, no longer bounded by the rules of the normal world. The kill screen splashes by and the game resets and Billy feels even more confused about the Edge than he did before. He stares at the machine for a long time pondering the encounter he just had, mystified.

A thousand miles away in Queens NY, a Jamaican immigrant named Abner Bancroft Ashman is playing Ms. Pac-Man in a local pizza shop. Abner is convinced he’s paid for the machine himself, despite his marathon, multi-hour runs, such as the one he is in right now. Abner has a weird religious philosophy about Ms. Pac-Man. Not any scientific or critical viewpoint, he merely takes the lessons it preaches and moves on to the next level. Tonight he is farther than he has ever been. The owner left him the key and told him to lock up on his way out. They had closed at least 6 hours ago. Abner deftly collects a final set of invisible dots as a banana suddenly turns into a slash and then a percent sign and flies off the screen in dramatic elliptical arc.

On the next level the game has gone completely sideways, a chaotic underworld in contrast to the terrestrial banality of the previous levels. As he crept around wildly dodging random characters he noticed something he truly had never seen before. Another Ms. Pac-Man was wandering around, also visibly freaked by the chaos of the game world. He pushed towards it, and it towards he, then they both stopped and pulled away. Again they danced, towards and away, but asynchronously. They spun around in a tight circle, one clockwise, the other counter clockwise. Was it intelligent? How could it be moving? Why was there a single point of non-randomness in a sea of mish-mashed characters and computer code? Before he could do anymore probing, a rogue symbol smashed into him from nowhere and the kill screen splashed out resetting the game. Abner did not have any knowledge of the inner workings of computers, ROM, memory and game engines. His brain heated up and his heart leapt into his chest in a fashion he had felt very few times before. He felt so utterly close to God.

========== Spoiler ===========

They are both going off the edge of the game’s machine code, to the kill screen, at exactly the same time, meet each other ingame, have a seeming conversation with just the confused gyrations of hteir ms. Pacmans. The lakc of instructions and the seeming random, seeming inconceivable luck of the moment has connected two worlds in a totally unexpected way. This reveals the Deus-ex-machina of it. The fringe world on the edge of valid memory. The innate beauty and complexity of the universe and nature displayed in 8 bit characters on the game screen to two of the first ambassadors to true virtual reality.

Use wikipedia on billy Mitchell for home town etc, where he would be in 1984, Hollywood Florida… born july 16, 1965.. in 1984 he was.. 19 after july say its august but still stupid hot cause its florida..

http://laweekly.blogs.com/joshuah_bearman/files/harpers_billy_mitchell.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ms_pacman

4kb ram, Z80, 3.6 Mhz, wikipedia Z80, Ms Pac man is the game.

Like Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man has a bug in the fruit-drawing routine, which renders the 256th board unplayable. While it may be possible to reach the 256th board using the "rack test" cheat available as a DIP switch (usable through MAME or other arcade emulator), the actual arcade hardware will crash at or around the 134th board. At this point in the game, a bug in the code causes invalid data tables to be used for a subroutine which is supposed to draw invisible characters which slow down the ghosts in the tunnels^[1]. On level 142, a similar bug causes a corrupt value to be loaded into the pointer to the maze data, causing the screen to turn black. Although the ghosts and Ms. Pac-Man are still visible, the game becomes unplayable.

The end of Ms. Pac Man

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk1EA8LslW8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAv_jhnXuO8&feature=related

Abner Bancroft Ashman = savant

Jamaican immigrant from queens

• First person to achieve a perfect Pac-Man score of 3,333,360, achieved July 4, 1999 at Funspot Family Fun Center in New Hampshire. ^[3]
• Achieved a score on Donkey Kong Jr. of 957,300 in 2004.^[1]
• Achieved a score on Donkey Kong of 1,050,200 in 2007.^[7]
• Achieved a score on Burgertime of 7,881,050 in 1984. The score was beaten in 2006 by Bryan L Wagner.^[1]

Comments :

Jared :

Hmmm, do they converse knowing they are talking to each other? Or do they each think that they are talking to the CPU or some type of God manifestation in the computer when really they are conversing with another player? Will be interesting to see where you go with that part.

Me :

I decided to leave it to the user to interpret. Maybe they have crossed a void in time, maybe their rom code is intricately llinked in a corner case of probability and quantum entanglement, them beign the only two people who have ever explored the space at hte end of the rom code... or perhaps its an "AI" an intelligent side effect of their playing the game, adn it has tampered with the bits at the bottom and created something out of randomness that is greater than the intended software could acheive... maybe it is god mixing it up in the ether... i think it works every which way and i want to write it in such a way that the reader gets to decide what they like best..

they have a "conversation" because they know how to move about the game world. They share a common tongue of "how to dodge a ghost" or "how to track down a bouncing fruit" and that language shows in their motions.. hence why they both get a haunting feeling of the presense of intelligence..