The Mario speedrunner Kosmic has recently published a new video online in which he claims to have successfully found a way to beat the famous Donkey Kong "kill screen".
If you've happened to spend a lot of time in the past watching competitive players of the 1981 Nintendo arcade game, you'll probably already know that the 117th board on level 22 is considered by many to be the logical endpoint of the game. This is the stage at which even high-level players claim to be unable to beat the game, with the timer being limited to just 4 seconds — an amount of time that is considered far too short to reach Pauline waiting at the top of the screen.
Recently, however, Kosmic has come across a way to technically allow players to get past this stage, though it seems highly unlikely that anyone will ever be able to pull it off, without having superhuman skills and a remarkable amount of luck.
This is because the trick requires players to perfectly input a ladder glitch to levitate Mario to the top of the barrel stage, which the speedrunner claims requires the "player to be too perfect", needing them to enter the glitch perfectly 90 times to successfully beat the stage.
In addition to that, there is also the issue of RNG with Kosmic also arguing that it would require players to get extremely lucky to extend the timer beyond the standard 4 seconds. Firstly, players would need to get Donkey Kong to delay throwing the first barrel, which is a one-in-three chance before having him enact a slightly longer delay, which Kosmic estimates translates to the odds of 1 in 32.
Using frame advance and an old save file on an emulator, Kosmic was able to show this working in theory and reached what he calls "the true kill screen", which turned out to be the rivet stage at level 22-6.
You can watch the video above for a more technical breakdown on the topic.