system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5 why older cartridge games freeze on a single frame rather than crashing completely? What makes the console "stick" on the last given instruction, rather than cutting to a color or corrupting the screen?
gpt
The way games usually work is that there is a large part of the executed code to calculate the game world (i.e. where is everything, what values does everything have, what is the next step for the AI, etc.), and then render the scene in one go and update the screen with that new scene rendition. The graphics card will just put on screen whatever it was last told to output, forever.

So if any of that fails, you are stuck with whatever the latest "update the screen" did. 

In modern software, the game runs in a container, which is monitored by the operating system, and as soon as a crash is detected, the OS will kill that container, present a nice error message to the user, and then continue on as if the game was never started.

In older consoles, the game was basically taking direct control of the console's hardware, including the graphics card, so if the game crashed there was nothing there to detect that crash and order the graphics card to display something else. Same goes with input controllers etc., so your only option was to unplug the power supply and reboot the console.