The competitive Tetris scene continues to evolve and the latest discovery in this area is surprising. Last January and at the age of 13, Willis Gibson aka Blue Scuti became the first player to “finish” the NES version of Tetris. No human has yet managed to achieve this feat because of the numerous bugs the game suffers from. Once level 138 is reached, the game code can no longer keep up and begins to generate unreadable colors for the Tetrominos. Add to that a blazing speed of play, advancing through the levels requires superhuman reflexes, but also luck.
Not being designed to go this far, the points calculation algorithm can no longer keep up and each new deleted line can cause a fatal bug called a killscreen. The game therefore stops abruptly, regardless of the player’s ability to continue. The community considers that Blue Scuti “finished” the game because he managed to trigger a killscreen on level 255, the last in the game. After this level, Tetris is meant to start from scratch to allow for an infinite gameplay loopbut repeated killscreens normally prevent this exploit. This is how young Michael Artiaga aka dogplayingtetris, 16 years old, enters the history of the game in this month of October 2024.
The very first “rebirth” of Tetris NES
Equipped with a modified version of the game to avoid crashes, Michael Artiaga broke the Tetris record by becoming the first human player to exceed level 255 and trigger the game’s return to square one. To keep up with the fast pace of the game after level 29, players must master hypertapping and rolling, professional techniques allowing you to press buttons up to 30 times per second.
The teenager’s feat lies in maintaining this grueling technique over several hundred levels. It was live on Twitch in front of hundreds of spectators that the teenager achieved the impossible: surpassing level 255 and continuing a game for another 40 minutes for a total of 4,216 lines cleared and 29.4 million points.
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Especially since despite all the corrections applied to its version of the game, Tetris still suffered from certain inevitable bugs. The notoriously impossible level 235 not only comes with nearly unreadable visuals, but also requires nearly 810 lines to advance to the next one due to code errors.
“I never want to play this game again, I was starting to lose my mind“ concluded Michael Artiaga after his historic record. The young player has been on the competitive Tetris scene since he was 10 years old and has already won the world championships twice. A hell of a track record that probably ended up disgusting him: when passion turns into obsession.
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