Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Classic Games (Games)

Teen Achieves First NES Tetris 'Rebirth,' Proves Endless Play Is Possible (arstechnica.com) 45

Posted by BeauHD from the monumental-achievements dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: 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. And after a bit of celebration and recovery on the low levels, Artiaga managed to keep his rolled-over game going for another 40 minutes, finally topping out after a total of 4,216 lines and a record 29.4 million points.

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. Still, NES Tetris' first-ever level rollover is a monumental achievement and a testament to just how far competitive classic Tetris has come in a short time.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Teen Achieves First NES Tetris 'Rebirth,' Proves Endless Play Is Possible More

Teen Achieves First NES Tetris 'Rebirth,' Proves Endless Play Is Possible

Comments Filter:

  • the USSR goal of wasting the USA's time with this (Score:5, Funny)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2024 @06:38PM (#64849957)

    the USSR goal of wasting the USA's time with this game has been hit.

    • What do you mean? This could has a bright future in brick laying!

      • could = kid. Where is EDIT Slashdot ???

      • Though I doubt this was an intent, this game would've been useful in getting people used to repetitive factory work, and to do their tasks faster and with fewer errors. It almost seems like that's what it was designed for. But not long after this game was created and gained traction, the USSR collapsed.

  • "Still, NES Tetris' first-ever level rollover is a monumental achievement "

    I mean, congrats and everything, but 'monumental'?

    Umm hello, I ate every single Oreo left in the box last night, clearly that was a monumental achievement, no?

    • "Still, NES Tetris' first-ever level rollover is a monumental achievement "

      I mean, congrats and everything, but 'monumental'?

      Umm hello, I ate every single Oreo left in the box last night, clearly that was a monumental achievement, no?

      Awesome! We are not worthy!

    • You ate 256 Oreos, and are back to a full box ?

      • You ate 256 Oreos, and are back to a full box ?

        Don't tell my wife, she wanted a few of them. But I monumentally ate them all. Then I monumentally went to bed and slept monumentally.

        See how silly that sounds? I do.

    • If it took you years of trying to eat those Oreos it would most definitely be a monumental achievement of yours as well, especially how stale they would be.

      • Even if it took years, it wouldn't be a 'monumental' achievement. Words have meanings, and that ain't one of 'em.

        Lots and lots and LOTS of other words would apply, but not 'monumental'. Sorry.

    • Re:Really? Was it? (Score:4, Informative)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @05:11AM (#64850579) Homepage Journal

      It's the culmination of multiple people's work to advance the speed at which people can play Tetris.

      Originally it was thought to be impossible to get past about level 21 or so, because the game because so fast you couldn't press the left/right buttons on the controller fast enough to get the pieces to the edges of the screen.

      Someone invented a new technique that made it possible. Instead of pressing the buttons on the front face of the controller, you hold one finger over the button and use the other to hand tap the *back* side. Because you can roll four fingers over the back in a drumming motion, you can activate that button fast enough to get to the screen edges. Obviously, you have to be a very good player as well.

      The game glitches when you get to the upper levels, with some of them using a colour palette that makes it very difficult to see what is happening. Strategies were developed to get through those as well. This is all over the course of decades since the game was released, and accelerated as speedrunning and streaming video became popular. This guy was live on a Twitch stream when he did it.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        he used a modified game, who cares?

      • It may have been or impressive or difficult, but it wasn't 'monumental'.

        Words have meanings FFS, and when used carelessly and improperly like that, they lose all sense of proportion and worth except as random sounds.

        "I took a cat to the pen of the conductor's off cap for breakfast all the only rocket." Just sounds, meaningless sounds.
         

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Oxford dictionary defines monumental as "great in importance, extent, or size". Seems to meet at least the extent criteria. It was for a long time thought to be impossible, and even if it was possible you had to get through 256 levels to reach it.

          • Oxford dictionary defines monumental as "great in importance, extent, or size". Seems to meet at least the extent criteria.

            Eh, maybe but not really. I'm not saying it wasn't hard, maybe even incredibly difficult, but so is taking a poop when you're constipated. But are either of those things truly 'monumental'? No, not really. Maybe if the game had 600 million levels then sure, that would probably qualify, but *256* levels is hardly beyond the imagination, even with the bugs and display issues.

            It was for a long time thought to be impossible, and even if it was possible you had to get through 256 levels to reach it.

            No it was not "thought to be impossible" because if people actually thought it was "impossible", they wouldn't have bothered trying. Pe

    • "Still, NES Tetris' first-ever level rollover is a monumental achievement "

      I mean, congrats and everything, but 'monumental'?

      Umm hello, I ate every single Oreo left in the box last night, clearly that was a monumental achievement, no?

      I had a mini Pacman game that ran on batteries when I was a kid. I learned the patterns and could literally play the damn thing on a fresh set of batteries until they died, which with how little horsepower it had, took a good god damned long time. Was that an achievement? Or was it just a curious kid hoping to see something cool if he spent enough time on the game? Or was I just bored out of my skull on a snow day? Even I don't know at this point. I was a silly kid doing a silly thing just cause I had the t

    • Check you're PMs, I may want to do a documentary. JustAnotherOldGuy did something impressive.

    • Yes, monumental. The monument being a stack of Tetris bricks that quickly vanished once the game recognized that it could eliminate those rows.

  • In the first few seconds, the kids eyes are going all over, while pieces fall and rotate and move into place. Looks faked. Impossible to rotate and move a piece perfectly without looking at it unless a bot is doing the work or just replaying a recording.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by stooo ( 2202012 )

      Who cares ?

    • When the video first starts, the game is still going pretty slow. He has time to look away. He's looking at the "next" block, by the time it shows up on the screen it's too late to do any thought and it's just twitch movement.

    • Impossible to rotate and move a piece perfectly without looking at it

      There are only four rotations, and the playfield is only ten blocks wide. That means that you can never need to rotate more than three times or move a block more than nine times (unless you're trying to get it under something) and since shapes actually appear in the middle you should never have to make more than what, 8 or 9 moves per piece? Why is that impossible to do without looking? The buttons are digital.

  • It took what, 30+ years of people failing to "beat" tetris by breaking it. Now we have someone who has gone 100 levels past that world record?

    • Re:Confused (Score:4, Informative)

      by _xeno_ ( 155264 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @09:12AM (#64850985) Homepage Journal

      Because there are two massive caveats that the article mentions:

      The biggest one is that he's using a modded version of Tetris. The original NES Tetris has a crash bug in it that is effectively impossible to avoid at some point once you start getting into the "glitched" levels that the original coders considered impossible.

      The second caveat are those "glitch" levels. The game becomes impossible at level 29, where the pieces fall too fast for you to move them to the sides by holding down the D-pad and also impossible by "regular" mashing left or right. But there's some technique they use in order to effectively mash left/right at 30Hz that allows them to get pieces over to the side and continue playing.

      The "glitch" levels mean that the score becomes bugged, so that you have to tally the score outside the game, which is why no one ever really bothered trying to play past the "kill screen" level until relatively recently.

      • But there's some technique they use in order to effectively mash left/right at 30Hz that allows them to get pieces over to the side and continue playing.

        I haven't played Tetris for years, and have never knowingly been in a room with a Nintendo (oh, hang on, rig recreation rooms ; probably I have. But I still don't know what one looks like without wiki-ing it.)

        But just about every OS I've tinkered with in any depth has had settings for the delay before repeating a keystroke, and the rate of repeat. These da

  • It is using a modified version of the game that won't crash. Sure it takes skill but anyone else could have done it if the modified game existed years ago.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pavon ( 30274 )

      No they couldn't. For decades after Tetris was released people thought playing past level 29 was impossible because you simply couldn't press buttons fast enough. It wasn't until around 2010 before someone developed a new hypertapping technique that made it kind of sort of possible, and then it wasn't until 2021 that the rolling technique was developed that finally allowed for real play at the higher levels. It was only after those techniques were developed and people spent years practicing them that anyone

  • His future as a husband (Score:3)

    by e3m4n ( 947977 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @02:01PM (#64851703)

    Will forever be organizing all the suitcases to fit in the trunk, the most efficient way possible.

  • Way back in the day, on either Win/286 or Win 3.1 (I think we skipped Win 3.0) there was an MS version of Tetris, which I think mentioned the name of the Russian inventor in the credits, where if you went over a score of 2^15 (32768), the score started being interpreted as a negative number. Long integers being read as short integers, or something like that.

    I killed a lot of time with that, before I discovered Elite - 8 galaxies of exploration in 76kb of code.

    • That is called two's complement. It is how you store both positive and negative integers in a single word without just using a bit so signify sign.

      • Oh yeah - I recognised what was going on immediately. I did do "Computing Science", not "Computing"! The name just slipped my mind for a time - it's not something I use often.

        My first work in assembly language was on a Honeywell mainframe (probably on an emulator within the mainframe - would you trust undergraduates to not incinerate the payroll?) which had really fun structures [wikipedia.org]. IIRC, bytes were 8 bits wide, but words were 36 bits wide; reals had 20 bits of mantissa and 16 bits of exponent. And that was i

Slashdot Top Deals

Remember the good old days, when CPU was singular?

Close