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Anonymous Coward writes:

"2048, the most addictive game since Tetris, was recently released. Its origin has been traced back as far as Threes!, which inspired 1024, which inspired 2048. Finally, an improved version, with animations, was written by Gabriele Cirulli, 19 year old from Italy.

The game has enthralled many, and led directly to the waste of countless potentially productive hours. A variety of permutations have since surfaced: 2048 in 3D, 2048 in 4D, and 9007199254740992.

Some ask why it's so addictive. I say, it attacks our pleasure centers in ways that Wesley Crusher already warned us about."

Hugh Pickens writes:

Time Magazine reports that thirty years ago, a little game about dropping geometrically strange thingamajigs originally clusters of punctuation marks into neat, lookalike rows kicked off on a wild journey that led it out of a metamorphosing Soviet Union to the United States. That game, dubbed Tetris after the Greek word for the number four, is today one of the most popular video games of all time going from "blockbuster" sales of 2 million already by 1988 to over 425 million paid mobile downloads today. "I never imagined Tetris was going to be this successful," says creator Alexey Pajitnov. "The simple, yet addicting nature of Tetris still has me playing it a few times every week. I meet fans from around the world who are also as passionate about Tetris as me, and there is no doubt in my mind Tetris will continue to expand and bring its classic appeal to new players in new ways and on new devices, whatever they may be."

Peter Hartlaub says that the problem with writing a tribute to "Tetris" is that there are no great moments associated with it which is pretty much the point of the game. It's about taking the player out of the moment, and into a sort of high-functioning intellectual limbo. "Tetris isn't about letting your mind wander to a different world: It's about shutting it down altogether," says Hartlaub. "It creates almost a meditative state. The DNA of Tetris, still popular in its own right, is evident in some of the most popular games in 2014, including the equally escapist "Bejeweled" and "Candy Crush Saga." Tetris perfected downtime, and this was no small thing. In defending my role as pop culture critic, I often try to explain that there's honor in making someone's BART commute seem to go by more quickly. Some of us create fine art, others craft a way to pass the time."

canopic jug writes:

Multiple sites are reporting on 13-year-old Tetris player, Willis Gibson, also known as Blue Scuti, who played until the NES version gave out. New play methods, such as rolling and hypertapping, were needed to reach a skill level where one can play as long as endurance and the software hold out. In his case it took over half an hour on the NES using rolling:

Blue Scuti is a Tetris prodigy who employs the "rolling" controller technique, a new way of holding and using the NES controller that was popularized in 2021. Rolling surpassed "hyper tapping," which requires players to tap the controller's D-pad 12 times per second, as the fastest and best way of playing Tetris. Rolling is a method where players roll their fingers on the bottom of an NES controller and use that pressure to push the controller into their other hand, which presses the D-pad to move the blocks. With rolling, players can push the D-pad at least 20 times per second, which is fast enough to theoretically play the game until it breaks. The technique has completely revolutionized competitive Tetris over the last few years.

Also at Tom's Hardware, Tetris was finally beaten after 34 years, game kill screen pops up at Level 157 — hypertapping and rolling were key techniques and the BBC, Tetris: How a US teenager achieved the 'impossible' and what his feat tells us about human capabilities.

Previously:
(2023) Hackers' Delight: a History of MIT Pranks and Hacks
(2023) Tetris' Creators Reveal the Game's Greatest Unsolved Mysteries
(2021) Tetris is no Longer Just a Game, but an Algorithm that Ensures Maximum Hotel Room Occupancy
(2014) Happy 30th Birthday Tetris!

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/nes-tetris-first-ever-rebirth-loops-past-level-255-and-back-to-zero/

Months ago, 13-year-old Willis "Blue Scuti" Gibson became the first person to "beat" NES Tetris, crashing the game after a 1,511-line, 157-level performance. Over the weekend, 16-year-old Michael "dogplayingtetris" Artiaga became the first to reach an even more impressive plateau in the game, looping past Level 255 and instantly rolling the game all the way back to the ultra-slow Level 0.

It took Artiaga a bit over 80 minutes and a full 3,300 cleared lines to finally achieve the game's first near-mythical "rebirth" live in front of hundreds of Twitch viewers.
[...]
Artiaga's record does come with a small asterisk since he used a version of the game that was modified to avoid the crashes that stopped Blue Scuti's historic run.
[...]
NES Tetris was never designed for play past Level 29, though, which means unintended glitches start to get in the way of any truly endless Tetris sessions. At Level 138, a memory overflow error causes the Tetris pieces to show up in some increasingly funky colors, including palettes that are incredibly hard to make out at Levels 146 and 148.
[...]
Even with a modified game, though, Artiaga faced another massive mountain of a glitch before he could achieve rebirth: Level 235. While the Tetris Level counter usually cycles every 10 lines, vagaries of the game's binary-coded decimal line counter cause the level count to get stuck on 235 for a whopping 810 lines. To make matters worse, the Level 235 glitched color palette is a dull green that is hard to see against the game's black background, making the level a true test of endurance.
[...]
Artiaga—who started playing high-level Tetris competitively at the age of 10 in 2019—has won the Classic Tetris World Championship two times, in addition to setting multiple records in the game and dominating many smaller tournaments. Despite all that, he said during his stream that "this is the best thing I've ever done in Tetris, bro."
[...]
"Oh my god, I'm so glad that game is over, bro," Artiaga said on stream. "I never want to play this game again, bro... I was starting to lose my mind."

Now that the Tetris rebirth has been proven humanly possible (with crash-avoidance mods, at least), the community will no doubt move on to see who, if anyone, can complete a double rebirth in a single uninterrupted Tetris session.
[...]
One thing's for sure: The classic Tetris scene has certainly come a long way since the days of the Level 29 "kill screen."

Side Note: Tetris is now over 40 years old.

Previously on SoylentNews:
Tetris -- A Cognitive Vaccine - 20240927
Hackers Discover How to Reprogram NES Tetris From Within the Game - 20240512
NES Tetris Beaten - 20240106
Hackers' Delight: a History of MIT Pranks and Hacks - 20231124
Tetris' Creators Reveal the Game's Greatest Unsolved Mysteries - 20230428
Happy 30th Birthday Tetris! - 20140608

Original Submission