Berzerk: Game 1 (Atari 2600)

Strange! At the score of 58,520 the game suddenly crashed and went to the game selection screen! 

Please note: The digits in Berzerk are always a bit difficult to read and here I didn't have the opportunity for a close-up of the score. However watching the build-up of the score towards the end of the video should claify it.

Thanks for watching! 

Nice run. Yes here

@RetroRob: The reason for this is because of the way the game was programmed. Essentially, there are two counters ... one frame counter that increments every frame. When the frame counter reaches 256, the system is polled to see if there is any controller activity at that moment. If there is, the frame counter is reset to 0 and starts all over again. If there isn't, then the other counter, the "Attract mode" counter, increments by one, and the frame counter is reset to 0 and starts incrementing again. Once the second counter reaches 256, the game assumes the player is idle and goes into "Attract Mode", which is the non-playable mode the game is in when you first turn the console on. This happens to everyone eventually. Tl;dr: You can sit still for only so long before the game thinks you've walked away.

@ZilchSr:

Thanks for this expert advise, Garrett! :-) Sounds like you have experience in programming (Atari?) games!

@omargeddon:

Thanks, Omar! :-)

fair play, yes on all 

@emmbo:

Thanks, emmbo! :-)