To be fair, we are talking about arcade games. You were not supposed to finish them, but to finish your money before that :-) [].

You are paying for a game, so you have the right to continue playing until you die. In that context, restarting the game (hopefully with an higher difficulty level) is the proper course of actoin

[] The authors of Pacman probably didn't even think you would be able to reach level 256 and overflow the variable. That's how you get to a kill screen that corrupts memory.