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
Related Stories
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."
Despite creating one of the most recognizable video games of all time, Tetris creators Alexey Pajitnov (who first coded the game in Russia) and Henk Rogers (who was instrumental in bringing the game to prominence in the West) have not been all that recognizable to the general public. That has started to change, though, with the recent release of Apple TV's Tetris movie, which dramatizes the real-life story of the pair's unlikely friendship and business partnership.
In Ars Technica's latest Unsolved Mysteries video, Pajitnov and Rogers went all the way back to the game's earliest origins. That includes the origin of "the Tetris song," aka Korobeiniki, which Game Boy Tetris fans have had stuck in their heads for decades now.
Related:
Happy 30th Birthday Tetris! 20140608
Most Addictive Game Since Tetris Released 20140318
It may be dated but contains many years of pranks!
Hackers' delight: A history of MIT pranks and hacks:
MIT's legacy as one of the world's most prestigious technical universities has a curious byproduct — a history of clever pranks, or "hacks."
Take a look at the University's long history of clever public disruptions.
Latest: According to Rachel D., an MIT Admissions blogger, Lobby 7 was converted into the anti-gravity Battle Room from the novel 'Enders Game' on the same weekend the movie adaptation was released. Outside, Killian Court was draped with banners signiying three different armies in the sci-fi story: Grffin, Dragon, and Tiger.
The day after the "Breaking Bad'' finale, students turned the school's Alchemist into an homage to Heisenberg, the alter-ego of show's main character.
Unknown persons converted the scaffolding construction workers are using to install a new skylight in MIT's Great Dome into a Pac-Man reference. (Lights along the L-shaped scaffolding, representing the dots from the game, are seen better at night.) This may be the most recent stunt by MIT's student body, but it's far from the first.
In 2012, MIT hackers turned the Green Building, the tallest building in Cambridge, into a giant, playable, full color game of Tetris. The project was the result of almost five years of planning, according to MIT's school newspaper.
In April 2012, an odd addition appeared on the Stata Center roof in MIT.
Hackers placed a Dalek, a cyborg from the British series "Doctor Who" on top of the school's Computer Science and Artificial Laboratory.
In 2010, Cantabrigians noticed a strange sight atop an MIT building: A police call box reminiscent of the time machine used by science fiction hero Doctor Who.
In 2009, MIT students built an upside-down room at the Wiesner building on Ames Street in Cambridge, according to the Cambridge Chronicle. The students furnished the room with a pool table, framed painting, and leather seats.
The upside-down room even featured a cat.
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!
New method could help high-score chasers trying to avoid game-ending crashes:
Earlier this year, we shared the story of how a classic NES Tetris player hit the game's "kill screen" for the first time, activating a crash after an incredible 40-minute, 1,511-line performance. Now, some players are using that kill screen—and some complicated memory manipulation it enables—to code new behaviors into versions of Tetris running on unmodified hardware and cartridges.
[...] But a recent video from Displaced Gamers takes the idea from private theory to public execution, going into painstaking detail on how to get NES Tetris to start reading the game's high score tables as machine code instructions.
Taking over a copy of NES Tetris is possible mostly due to the specific way the game crashes. Without going into too much detail, a crash in NES Tetris happens when the game's score handler takes too long to calculate a new score between frames, which can happen after level 155. When this delay occurs, a portion of the control code gets interrupted by the new frame-writing routine, causing it to jump to an unintended portion of the game's RAM to look for the next instruction.
Usually, this unexpected interrupt leads the code to jump to address the very beginning of RAM, where garbage data gets read as code and often leads to a quick crash. But players can manipulate this jump thanks to a little-known vagary in how Tetris handles potential inputs when running on the Japanese version of the console, the Famicom.
Unlike the American Nintendo Entertainment System, the Japanese Famicom featured two controllers hard-wired to the unit. Players who wanted to use third-party controllers could plug them in through an expansion port on the front of the system. [...]
There is a fair, and long running, amount of research for that playing Tetris helps people deal with trauma, PTSD of some kind. Adding some more recent research then where it can reduce PTSD symptoms in healthcare workers (nurses) that worked with trauma COVID19 patients.
Playing something such as Tetris (it's a bit unclear if it's just Tetris or a similar style of games of which Tetris is the prime example) can induce some relaxing zen like state or a "cognitive vaccine". 20 minutes is apparently the prescribed dosage of rotational healing experience. There was the 15 minutes of talking to before playing Tetris. But clearly the healing power of Tetris at work ...
The study was carried out with healthcare workers in Sweden who worked with COVID-19 patients and were exposed to work-related trauma. It was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic between September 2020 and April 2022. A total of 164 participants were included. Participants were recruited through information at workplaces. Participation was entirely voluntary. The criterion for participation was that the person had at least two intrusive memories per week due to traumatic events that occurred at work.
https://www.uu.se/en/press/press-releases/2024/2024-09-20-ptsd-symptoms-can-be-reduced-through-treatment-including-a-video-game
https://www.psych.ox.ac.uk/news/tetris-used-to-prevent-post-traumatic-stress-symptoms
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ledow on Friday October 11 2024, @02:22PM (13 children)
"Proves Endless Play is Possible"
If you modify the game to stop it bugging out and crashing at level 157 of 235.
Which sounds very much like endless play is NOT possible with the original game.
And if you want endless play by modification, you could just.... make that happen.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by JoeMerchant on Friday October 11 2024, @02:58PM (6 children)
>endless play is NOT possible with the original game.
>And if you want endless play by modification, you could just.... make that happen.
True, but... you could argue that: had the QA team at least given minimal attention to levels 30-255, they would have at least fixed the crash bugs.
>move on to see who, if anyone, can complete a double rebirth in a single uninterrupted Tetris session.
In other words: Current high score: 1. Looking to see if anyone can make it to 2. If this is going to get serious, the community needs to agree on how those crash avoidance mods are "officially" going to be done.
Also: if this were my hobby - which it isn't - I think I'd approach the challenge with a robot player...
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday October 11 2024, @06:32PM (5 children)
Not sure if Nintendo will issue any cartridge replacement patches 35 years after the release. But I strongly doubt it.
It could also be that the QA was just not that good at Tetris. They didn't really expect a lot of people to reach that far. You would just die and start a new game. Also a lot of the errors seems to be that it's running out of (limited) resources, and then overwrite itself and crashes. I guess they could have caught or thought about that. But they clearly didn't. I just don't think they had the twitch-generation in mind for playing the games.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday October 11 2024, @07:04PM (4 children)
Well, if you look at it, how many Tetris cartridges did they actually sell?
Now, today, what percentage of players of their Tetris have ever even made it past level 29?
I'm going to guess, by the percentages, the number of people who play up to the crashing levels represent less than a single cartridge sold - in other words: the business team got it right.
Now, at this late stage - it's kinda cool to stretch the limits into this kind of uncharted space and be able to do things like play to wrap-around. Future retro game authors should take note and design for this kind of thing intentionally. A game I wrote ramped up difficulty with each level, became basically un-winnable above level 5, but... maybe a perfect player could get to level 7, maybe a very very lucky perfect player could get to level 8. If I were being cool about it, beating level 8 would give a very special easter egg.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday October 11 2024, @08:44PM (3 children)
About 8 million or so from what I can quickly gather, for the NES alone -- all other systems doesn't matter cartridge or not.
How many players at the time made it past lv29? Fairly sure it's a niche crowd to say the least. Considering it used to be referred to as the kill-screen. Most people just didn't bother or think about it to much. It just crashed, then you hit restart and then you played another game. But it was a known thing and I think it was somewhat common for "pro-players", even tho by the amount of copies sold that is a very small group of people. But I'm sure it was more then one cartridge between them.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday October 11 2024, @09:10PM (2 children)
I'm going to guess, by now these decades later, there have probably been 40 million or more people who played their Tetris more than just a casual game or three.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday October 11 2024, @09:17PM (1 child)
That is probably a low amount. If you count all platforms and/or versions of Tetris. There are innumerable versions for all systems, is there a system out there that doesn't have a version Tetris? From computers, to consoles to phones to whatever. Even my parents played Tetris once or twice, but they didn't care for it.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday October 12 2024, @01:56AM
Oh, I was playing Tetris on IBM PCs in the 1980s, more than a little. If you throw in all the licensed versions it's certainly in the hundreds of millions of players, and if you add the unlicensed ripoff clones it's probably over a billion by now (who have played three games or more)
NES was a platform with broad reach, but certainly didn't have a majority of the Tetris players overall.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Friday October 11 2024, @03:18PM (5 children)
In my view, other lessons are more important which I find both astonishing and amusing.
How can the special cases of 157 of 235 exist and that 235 be still completable after a ridiculous amount of 810 lines? Of course, after a moment of reflection, it seems entirely possible as they try to inject some variability into the gameplay depending on level. Still a stark reminder that bugs can lurk everywhere and every case has to be tested. Could those bugs have been found by fuzzing? I doubt it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11 2024, @03:48PM (2 children)
or these people could just get a life, damn
(Score: 2) by Tork on Friday October 11 2024, @04:02PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday October 11 2024, @04:56PM
I believe the variability of these higher levels is more unintentional emergent behavior than any intentional design.
In a very rough analogy, it's like when Quorra takes Sam "off the grid" in Tron Legacy... It's navigable space, but it wasn't intentionally designed and most programs / users can't operate out there for long.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11 2024, @04:41PM (1 child)
TFA has brief explanations of the issues and links to more detailed ones.
For the first, basically the score calculation takes increasing amounts of time as the level increases and eventually it takes so long that a vblank interrupt crashes the game (according to the linked explanation, this doesn't always happen and the earliest it is known to occur is at level 155).
For the second basically, the code which compares the line count to the level number has internal integer overflow bugs when an increasingly negative value wraps around to positive at 2190 lines, finally resolving when this internal value goes back to being negative again at 3000 lines.
2190 lines would normally be level 219 but when you start a level greater than 9 the bugs in this comparison also have you levelling up sooner than expected, in this case with a level 29 start, reaching level 235 at 2190 lines.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11 2024, @04:58PM
Correction: the starting level was 19 and at this start, level 235 is reached at 2290 lines and the internal overflow resolves itself at 3100 lines.
(Score: 2) by DadaDoofy on Friday October 11 2024, @05:40PM
I'm not sure what's being accomplished here. If part of the criertia is, I get to modify the software, I can make any game infinitely playable.