Teen Achieves First NES Tetris “Rebirth,” Proves Endless Play is Possible
Freeman writes:
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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"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.
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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
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