The legendary video game Pac-Man doesn’t actually have an ending—instead, a single 8-bit integer overflow bug causes the game’s internal counter to glitch out at Level 256, violently corrupting the right half of the screen into a chaotic mess of random symbols and rendering the final stage completely unplayable.

Pac-Man, released in 1980, is one of the most played video games in human history. Hundreds of millions of people have guided that yellow circle around its maze, eating dots, fleeing ghosts. Almost none of them have ever seen the game end. Not because they weren’t good enough — but because, in a very real