Months ago, 13-year-old Willis “Blue Scuti” Gibson became the first person to “beat” the NES Tetriscollapsing the game after a performance of 1,511 lines and 157 levels. Over the weekend, 16-year-old Michael “dogplayingtetris” Artiaga became the first to reach an even more impressive level in the game, surpassing level 255 and instantly sending the game back to ultra-slow level 0.
It took Artiaga a little over 80 minutes and 3,300 full lines cleared to finally pull off the game's first near-mythical “revival” live in front of hundreds of Twitch viewers. And after some celebration and recovery at the low levels, Artiaga managed to keep his game rolling for another 40 minutes, finally peaking after a total of 4,216 lines and a record 29.4 million points.
Artiaga's record-breaking game begins just a few minutes in, while the “rebirth” rollover occurs at 1:21:24.
Artiaga's record does come with a small asterisk as he used a version of the game that was modified to avoid the bugs that stopped Blue Scuti's historic streak. Still, NES Tetris'The first level change is a monumental achievement and a testament to the extent to which the competitive classic Tetris It has arrived in a short time.
The mountain of failures
For decades, NES Tetris Players found it virtually impossible to pass level 29, a point where pieces begin to fall so quickly that it is nearly impossible to get them to the pit side simply by holding left or right on the controller. However, in recent years, the development of hypertapping and then rolling grips has allowed the professional-level NES Tetris Players can achieve faster piece movement by tapping the directional inputs up to 30 times per second. With perfect execution of the rolling technique, it was at least theoretically possible to preserve an NES game. Tetris going indefinitely, even at level 29 speeds.
NES Tetris However, it was never designed to be played beyond level 29, meaning that unintentional glitches start to get in the way of any truly endless game. Tetris sessions. At level 138, a memory overflow error causes Tetris pieces that will appear in some increasingly original colors, including palettes that are incredibly difficult to distinguish at levels 146 and 148.