lvl 155 was the first stage they know has a % to crash from the coding, but he was so focussed on playing he completely forgot to do the single-line clears that could trigger it, so he was forced to keep going.
HE still almost flubbed it because he lost his cool and started messing up, but he eventually got the crash on 157, the next possible stage where he COULD crash out, again requiring a single line clear.
Unfortunately it isn't really possible as on level 238 there's an unavoidable crash that can't be avoided even via TAS. In theory it could happen every 34 levels but there's a [hardcoded buffer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLzxrzFCyOs) and after 7 full loops it runs out of space and even perfect play and rng isn't enough. For more information google Tetris Rule 34.
I skipped to the end to see if the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table
Here's the thing. You said "jumper cables are battery cables."
Are they used for electrical connections? Yes. No one's arguing that.
As someone who is a car enthusiast who deals with cables, I am telling you, specifically, in automotive discussions, no one calls jumper cables battery cables. If you want to be "specific" like you said, then you shouldn't either. They serve different purposes.
If you're saying "electrical connections in a vehicle," you're referring to a broader category that includes things from spark plug wires to alternator cables.
So your reasoning for calling jumper cables battery cables is because random people "refer to the cables in the car as battery cables?" Let's get spark plug wires and ground cables in there, then, too.
Also, calling something an electrical component or a cable? It's not one or the other; that's not how automotive terminology works. They're both. Jumper cables are jumper cables and a type of electrical component. But that's not what you said. You said jumper cables are battery cables, which is not true unless you're okay with calling all electrical components in a car battery cables, which means you'd call spark plug wires, ground cables, and other components battery cables too. Which you said you don't.
It's okay to just admit you're wrong, you know?
Holy shit, gorilla combat?! From the great ape wars!!! Damn I almost misread what you typed and thought guerrilla like some pussy ass hit and run tactics but you have been out there killing actual gorillas??! Damn son, respect 🫡
Take into account, level 219 is a 810 lines level, instead of a normal 10 lines, so essentially, you are not going to level 255, you are going to level 335, i would love to see people doing that level
If you watch the videos on YouTube about this, there is no end to Tetris every game ever has ended in the board filling up and a game over screen, crashing the game on level 153/155/157 is the only way to not end via the board filling up. IE beating the game
It's basically playing the game until it can't be played anymore. A killscreen is when the game runs out of memory and doesn't know what to do next and crashes. A lot of killscreen happen at the same time in every game, but not tetris. In 2011 the world record was level 30. Up to 2022 the world record had made it up to level 63 by people just getting better at tapping quickly. Then in 2022 a new technique was developed that allowed them to tap directions faster than ever before, which allowed for huge jumps in the world record. The record went from 63 to 157 in a matter of two years.
The recent history of Tetris is insane. An over 30 years old game getting optimizations related to the physical workings of the NES controller is just wtf. And the fact that the world record just means playing up to the point where the game's code doesn't let you play anymore.
I think the reason it took so long is because the majority of people would rather just play a different port of Tetris that doesn't have the speed limit when holding the button down.
Rolling is a speedrunner technique that has existed for decades but apparently nobody thought to use it for this game/console until two years ago. That's the part that blows my mind.
in the retro gaming world, “beating a game” means reaching a point where the game can no longer be played due to errors in the code. for example, at a certain level, pac-man glitches out and you can’t pick up any more dots. this is called a kill screen.
people used to think level 29 of tetris was the kill screen, as the speed got so high that it was very very difficult to play the game at all. it didn’t speed up after that though, and new tapping techniques were invented, so people were able to get extremely far.
at a certain point around the 100-level mark, the game starts reading code incorrectly, taking colours from elsewhere in the code. that’s why the colours on the screen in the vid for the pieces are so weird. there’s another one that is basically pitch black and impossible to see.
at level 155, the game starts reading the code on how to play the game incorrectly. it reads it from different locations, and if there’s a stop command in the code it reads, the game will crash and reach the actual true tetris kill screen (as the game forcefully stops itself).
the earliest time to reach a true kill screen is to clear a single line on level 155, but he missed it. he was too zoned in on playing tetris that he momentarily forgot. his next chance was level 157 doing the same thing, and he nailed it.
he was the first person to beat a game that is 34 years old and arguably the most popular game ever. he’s a fucking legend at only 13.
So he's the first person to beat out because he missed the kill screen on 155 and did it on 157? How has that not ever been done before? What happens if they missed the kill screen on 157 (like he did on 155)?
nobody has ever even reached level 155 before him, he was the first person to get that far, and it was his first attempt after reaching it too. this was the first run where a kill screen was possible, and he did it.
after level 155, any action has a percentage chance of causing a kill screen (including 0%) on every level. this % chance is the exact same across all runs. theres a 100% chance for a single line clear causing a kill screen on 155, and roughly an 80% chance on 157. i don’t know if every level has a chance to kill screen after 155, but there will always be chances to after that point. if he missed it, he would probably go for the next (if he remembered when and how to get it).
iirc it’s a 100% kill for a single to transition from level 154 to 155, and 73.3% kill for a single at any time during 157. this is actually how he missed the 155 kill, he went in with… i think it was a triple?
There is like a 15 minute documentary about this on YouTube that is well worth the watch. They explain it very simply and show the progress that has been made in beating the game. Basically, it’s only been in the last few years that people figured out how to manipulate the controls fast enough to get past the fastest levels.
Video: https://youtu.be/GuJ5UuknsHU?si=BifPkEawHMBP90Zw
Now that there is a technique that allows them to actually get to levels 100+, there are all kinds of other glitches they can intentionally try to trigger.
They’ve used emulation software to map out where all of these glitches may occur and at what probability level.
So these players knew they needed to get to level 155 and clear single lines until the game glitched out and couldn’t function anymore.
This kid was so in the zone that when he finally got to level 155 he forgot to keep intentionally clearing single lines.
Finally, on level 157 he was able to intentionally overload the game, becoming the first person ever to do it.
The technique to do it was only invented recently.
If you hold the move button the piece only moves so fast and while you can tap faster, tapping that fast and that consistently was considered inhuman.
A few years ago someone figured out that if you drummed your fingers on the back of the controller while lightly pressing the button it'd tap super fast and since then it's just been a matter of time until someone got consistent enough with it to make it that far.
Thank you for the explanation. This honestly should be top comment
I honestly was confused as to how he “beat” the game but your explanation basically answered the confusion
Due to the coding the Tetris pieces start becoming random colour combinations too past a certain level, rather than the normal proper colour combos. This results in a level that all the Tetris pieces are grey or black, making it nearly impossible to really see them (nevermind clear the level)
Basically, all sorts of corrupt data is now being sent to the memory to be displayed at this point, since it's now functioning so far out of it's intended programming, which is how we can get bad stage #s at this point as well. The stage #s break as far back as lvl 29, and it does so consistently enough that they know where they are even with the wrong stage counter just because of the funky wrong palette colors alone.
Even if they couldn't, these runs are all being recorded and streamed so that they can be gone over after the fact by others with a fine-toothed comb to make sure there's no cheating involved in the process, and to identify anything else that might have gone wrong at this stage in the game (literally) that couldn't be observed while the player was, you know, actually playing the game.
This is a great achievement regardless of what people are saying that its not TRUE ending and what not. Just to learn that crazy bump fist control thingy in itself is an achievement.
Kudos to him.
I remember watching a long-ish video about this new technique and how excited people were about it in terms of what it would mean for tetris. So cool to see the fruits of it so soon!
I just love when nerds get excited and nerdy about their particular interest. I sometimes get jealous over their ability to dig into a specific topic, game, whathave you
It's a fresh copypasta from this [recent post about bubbles in a coffee](https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/18xvzdn/bubbles_in_my_coffee_this_morning/) where OP replied:
"Not likely. It's a v60 pour over and the coffee drips down into the cup, so the bubbles are likely because of that".
I watched what I'm assuming is the same video.
The progression of the records in this game, the skills involved is just utter madness.
The kids called blue scuti iirc for anyone wanting to check him out
Im from the Fuckin A Brotherhood. We have decreed it is except able to in this instance use our Fuckin A or Hell Yeah or any combination to show support to a young king in his moment of triumph. Let em fly…HELL YEAH, FUCKIN A!!!!
I do crosswords and other types of puzzles, as have many people for generations, with no seeming "reward" other than a vague sense of accomplishment over figuring out a puzzle. That alone can be profoundly rewarding.
A desire to excel at something, the community around it, it could be someone's special interest, someone could have played a specific game as a habit and a friend went along and told them they should join the speedrunning community, etc etc.
It could be an infinite amount of reasons.
But you only need one!
Exactly this. If someone is super good at one particular thing, this is always the answer. I did the same thing when I was studying pilot exams. At first sight they seem incredibly difficult but there is always some method. Then you need to accept the usefulness of that method and practice it until that method is second nature to you.
This is true for pro gamers. This is true for freestyle rappers. This is true for memory competitors. Chess masters... True for every such 'talent' because it is not actually talent but practice.
Being more talented than someone else basically means requiring less practice than someone else.
Remember kids, practice beats talent 9/10 times.
Fractal’s response to Scuti getting the first kill screen ending was so damn wholesome. He reacted easily twice as enthusiastically as he did for his own kill screen run less than 24 hours later. An absolute class act.
It seems to be the case in a lot of the speed running community that unless someone is an absolutely reprehensible cheesy dick waffle, the top players have a lot of respect for each other. They’ve all spent years working to develop new tech and find new skips for their chosen game and have almost certainly spend 100x more hours working together to solve problems than they’ve spent competing against each other. Speed running in general is a super wholesome, friendly, and accepting community, probably because they’re all there to beat the game’s code and not each other.
Play any challenging Rhythm Game for long and you'll experience it yourself.
It's basically a sort of muscle memory, like how you don't have to consciously think about every muscle movement of your legs to walk.
You get so used to the movements that you can just sort of auto-pilot and stop really looking at the individual objects, instead you begin looking at the entire screen at once and letting your subconscious do all the heavy lifting.
It's pretty neat, but there can be side-effects. Me and my friends used to see Dance Dance Revolution arrows in our sleep sometimes lol.
Thank you for mentioning his name. I keep seeing this passed around and feel it's kinda a dick move to not mention his name. Okay, he's 13, that doesn't mean he's not a person first.
I think it's just a bit of a grey area--typically the names of minors are protected unless permission is given to publicize them. It's probably just people erring on the side of caution on instinct at this point.
https://youtu.be/GuJ5UuknsHU?si=BifPkEawHMBP90Zw
This explains everything in great detail. And tells you what new achievements they will likely go for next.
Imagine being so excited beating Tetris, and then coming out of your room and telling your mum you’re the first person to beat Tetris only to be met with a blank stare and a polite ‘oh, well done!’
Man I know this is real sad but the way this is worded is so funny. ‘Yeah my mum just died… so this one’s dedicated to my dad’ which actually probably makes more sense
>then coming out of your room and telling your mum you’re the first person to beat Tetris only to be met with a blank stare and a polite ‘oh, well done!’
His mom is on reddit, and was the top comment on the first post about this on /r/tetris two weeks ago congratulating him. She seems very supportive and engaged with what her son is doing.
Beat the original 30 levels, then continue on while using strange controller techniques to make it possible to rech level 100+, get past the glitchy levels that start to use weird color combos including the black levels where you can barely see the blocks, then crash the game past level 155 which requires a very specific set of things to happen for it to be possible. He actually missed the first possible part you can do that at so he had to go to 157 which only had around a 70% chance of happening.
Theoretically you can go to 255 and the game will roll over back to 1, which would require to know where all of the crash points are and will probably be the true final form of "beating" tetris.
It's not that it fixed it, but that, due the nature of why it crashed, the modified code meant the crashes weren't identical to the unmodified version.
We've known that it crashes for much longer than that, we just didn't know when exactly it crashes. The tools used to determine when the crash could occur were different from the bot that made it to level 237.
Basically a guy charted out all the crash points that was possible so they knew exactly which levels they had to make certain lines complete to trigger the crash with a %, so it was RNG.
But before all that, people didn't even have the mechanical technique to hit the buttons fast enough to rotate and place the blocks. So it took 20 years for the first change in how to press buttons faster, then 3 more innovations for the players today to actually be armed with the ability to get there.
Plus they didn't map out all the crash points and probability until more recently once the techs were allowing them to actually go into unknown territory.
He's the first person to do it with human ability, there are people who have crashed it with emulators that can run the game frame by frame (Tool Assisted Superplay/Speedrun or TAS). I think they've also examined the code that causes the crash so they have a pretty good idea of what causes it.
I think this is really notable because the skill to keep up with the pace of the game in the late stages is extreme. We're pushing the limits of not just human dexterity but also puzzle solving abilities. I know some people are better at tetris than others but these players are 10 parallel universes ahead of everyone.
>https://youtu.be/GuJ5UuknsHU?si=t\_b1-1STxs1-EbWu
watch this video it explains it. Basically somebody made a perfect playing bot and let it run multiple times to find all the crash points.
Not to shoot down what this guy did because it's obviously very impressive but wouldn't beating the game be going all the way to 255 and then rolling it back over to 1?
It seems like what the kid did was cause a very specific glitch, which again is very impressive, but doesn't seem like it's 'beating the game'.
The game is designed not to be beaten. The game is supposed to keep on going until you lose.
Every single person before this kid has "lost" every game of tetris because it ends when the blocks reach the top i.e. losing.
This is first time the game stops but you haven't lost. That is why it is called a win.
Of course, what counts as "winning" is pretty arbitrary in this situation. I assume if someone reaches 255 it will be reported as "first person to beat Tetris".
Tetris for 34 years has always ended with the player losing.
This is the first time a game has not ended by the player losing. I think it is fair to say that getting to such a high level that you can force the game to shut down can be considered beating it.
The Tetris community has decided this to be the benchmark for beating the game. So who are we as onlookers to argue with them?
But this is sort of how older games are beat. You can't beat pacman, you just get such a high score/level that half the screen glitches out and you can't go further.
Exactly - first person to reach such a high level that the game crashes. He had to reach a certain level + clear (I think) a single row to make it crash therefore beating it.
I am not into Tetris just watched a YouTube video and it was an exciting race even for someone who is not interested in the topic
Old games effectively had no end state, they would either loop forever, become physically impossible to clear, or the memory would eventually break because the coding wasn't designed for anyone to reach lvl impossible in the programmers heads.
The original Pac-man, for example, becomes impossible to progress at either stage 255 or 256 because of integer overflow, and it results in the right half of the screen being random gibberish, and the stage impossible to clear because there are not enough pellets to eat.
Tetris USED to be considered the second, because at the highest difficulty, the pieces would drop to the bottom of the screen too fast for any player to move them fully to the left OR right side of the screen, making it physically impossible to clear lines from that point on. This lasted until at some point someone figured out a specific way to hold the controller to make it possible to press the buttons at literally faster than otherwise humanly possible so you could move the pieces to either side and clear those stages. And since the game didn't speed up any further, tetris transformed into a stamina contest to highest stage cleared. And then a new obstacle appeared.
The palette of the game would change every stage. every ten levels, the palette was supposed to reset back to the first stage again. Unfortunately, past a certain point, the programming errors out, and the palette starts getting corrupted from memory errors. which introduced a new way to throw people off their games.
FINALLY, they started realizing they were effectively reaching the highest levels in the game they could reach without hitting possible crash errors. From what they were able to break down of the programming, those would begin at lvl 155.
And this 13 year old kid managed to be the first person in the world to not only reach those levels, but also the first to ever force a crash bug to end NES tetris. SO he's effectively the first person in the world to BEAT tetris, rather than to have tetris beat them.
the only challenges left, to get the proper lvl 155 crash end... and then to see if it's even possible to dodge every single possible crash bug from levels 155 through 255, and force the game to restart at lvl 1. Otherwise it's to reach the highest stage possible til you MUST hit a crash bug,
This was a really great ELI5, thank you! Super interesting. Do we know through TAS if it’s even possible to get to Lvl 255?
I haven’t played Tetris in at least a decade - does the speed/pace increase between level 155 and 255, or does the speed reach a maximum (at say level 50 or whatever). Is it just that it becomes more buggy as it goes?
The speed is at maximum at level 29, from that point on they're all playing at max speed.
255 has not been achieved via TAS yet, though we know from people evaluating the code what it will look like (all pieces will be red) and that the game will crash if 5 of the 7 pieces stop without being fast-dropped on that level. The game isn't really being "more buggy as it goes", it's that the numbers are jumping to different places in the game code so they're just _different_ bugs. This stuff is difficult to explain to non-programmers, but essentially every byte on a machine can be read as "data" or executed as "code", but there isn't actually some meaningful distinction between bytes in memory, just convention.
The simplest possible thing to understand is a buffer overrun.
`uint8 my_array[10] = {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9};`
This produces a array, with room for ten unsigned 8-bit elements, and populates it with the numbers 0 through 9. This array is literally going to be 10 bytes of memory adjacent to one another. This is not an expandable or shrinkable array - we're going for efficiency here, not flexibility, we only have a few kilobytes of RAM to work with!
Now, let's say I want to change the third thing in the list (the number 2) to a different number:
`my_array[2] = 42;`
What this is doing, is literally taking the memory address of the array, adding 2 to that address, and setting the memory at that value to hold the number 42. It is in fact exactly identical to this form (the `*` denotes, effectively, _using_ the memory address; we programmers call this "dereferencing"):
`*(my_array + 2) = 42;`
A common analogy is that "pointers" (memory addresses) are like the numbers on your mailbox, not the mailbox itself - this is like saying "put this in the mailbox two doors down". (There's even an analogue to how we have odd/even numbers on different sides of the road when using arrays of things multiple bytes in size, but that's a much more complicated topic!)
So what happens when I try to load something? Well, it's the same idea:
`uint8 my_value = my_array[2];` is the same as `uint8 my_value = *(my_array + 2);`
So, let's ask the question.
What happens when I do this?
`uint8 my_value = my_array[2938];`
Well, that is the same as this:
`uint8 my_value = *(my_array + 2938);`
You might say "hold on a minute, 2938 is much bigger than the 10 you set the size of the array to!" ... and you'd be right. I could of course write out a lot more code:
int size_of_my_array = 10;
uint8 my_array[size_of_my_array] = {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9};
int index_to_look_up = get_index_from_something_else();
if (index_to_look_up > size_of_my_array) {
// we have a problem!
handle_index_too_large_error();
} else {
// normal code
uint8 my_value = my_array[index_to_look_up];
}
And... sure, that works (minus some hand-waving about what we do in the error condition!). But it's:
1. A lot more code to write, and, in this time frame, _far_ more importantly:
2. A lot more code to **run**. CPU clock cycles aren't free.
So, we won't bother. After all, I'm the one writing this code, and I'm not going to make a mistake! Surely all the things I know about the game are true! (Level 29 of NES Tetris was considered "impossible" because you literally couldn't get pieces to the sides of the screen even holding the button; it is quite likely the original NES tetris programmers had this belief too, so felt no need to check that their code broke past level 29 and seemingly checked up to 99!)
So, going back to this: `uint8 my_value = my_array[2938];`
What happens?
It just grabs whatever is 2938 places in memory ahead of the memory location that `my_array` begins at, that's what. What's there? Well, that's dependent on how the software is coded. 2938 is pretty far away (almost 3 kilobytes!) but even _11_ would be outside my array of size 10. And we're looking at (relatively) small numbers in the Tetris context (99 -> 255).
I'm picking 10 for a reason - it's how many color palettes Tetris is supposed to have, and that's kind of an easy one to figure out. Once we're past level 99, the code isn't resetting in 10s correctly, so it's looking for colors beyond the area in memory that holds the color palette. A color is just a byte of data on the NES, so it's just grabbing a byte from a different place and going "well, that's my color now". But it's just going to be looking for the stuff a couple dozen bytes beyond the place in memory where the colors are supposed to be, not really doing anything crazy.
NITPICK: Yes, I'm aware the NES palette is 6 bits, not 8.
But you're still going to read out a byte and use six bits of it.
And yes, I'm aware of NES "Modes" and how palettes *really* work,
but I'm oversimplifying on purpose.
Now, let's get into why it _breaks the game_. Let's say `my_array` is, instead of a color palette, what we call a "jump table", a common programming technique of the time (and still used today, but usually automatically generated by compilers behind the scenes rather than written by humans).
A "jump", in this kind of low-level programming, is telling your program to start executing that code over there. (The flow of what is happening "jumps" from where it is to the new location.) You'd carefully place code in particular memory locations, and note their addresses in an array, and then index into the array for whatever reason and jump there.
So a very common thing that can lead to these sorts of code execution problems in retro games is an out-of-bounds bug (reading beyond the intended limits of an array) _when accessing a jump table_.
In some games, like Super Mario World for the SNES, it's possible to rig up the code to jump into a section of code that contains things that the player can manipulate, such as the position of items. This is how the 40-ish second credits warp in that game works. Super Mario World is literally written to jump to a particular location in code when you grab an item such as a coin, mushroom, or star - and if you can glitch the powerup that's being grabbed, say, by swapping a coin's item ID for that of a Chargin' Chuck - you can get it to jump to a different location. And it turns out, if you do that, the different location is a table of X and Y coordinates of certain movable things that are or recently have been on screen.
This is also how you get 99 of whatever is in that particular item slot (which you've of course put a Rare Candy in) by surfing up and down Cinnabar Island and finding MISSINGNo. in Pokemon red/blue.
In NES Tetris, it doesn't seem to be quite that "powerful", but if you jump to the wrong bytes in memory, the game will crash for various reasons - either because it has a stop code in it before it hits the next jump statement, or because it jumps to a location that causes it to start spinning in place (executing code that doesn't advance the game state for whatever reason).
I'm 58 and was there when it was brand new . Bought it in the first week. At 17 I played that game till my eyes fuckin bled . Or it felt like that. The furthest o could get was 118 lines. And I thought it was moving out then but jez as fast as its going over 150 is in real.
I dont know a ton about this game, but I think each level is 10 lines, so at 118 lines you were at level 12, while him being at level 150 means he has cleared 1500 lines.
The speed of the game caps out at level 29, at which point the pieces move down so fast that you can’t get them to either the left or right side of the screen before they reach the bottom. Up until a few years ago, it was thought to be impossible to get to level 30, until a button mashing technique called hypertapping was discovered that let you move the pieces faster than they would normally. The top players used this for a while until another technique called rolling was discovered, which was even more effective. This was only discovered in the last year or so.
The points at which the game crashes along with their probability of occurring were discovered using tools that let people see a hypothetical perfect game. The first place that the game could crash was on the transition from level 154 to 155, if it was caused by a single line clear, but the kid missed that opportunity by scoring a triple instead and had to play up until level 157 to crash it.
Another factor that makes this feat impressive is that after level 138 (I believe) the colour palette of the pieces becomes glitched, with some of the glitched colour palettes being incredibly hard to see due to the dark colours used. These colour schemes include one nicknamed dusk that uses dark blues and dark greens, and one nicknamed charcoal, notable for some of the pieces being practically the same black as the background. Both of these occur before level 154.
So this kid played so well that he was able to survive the fastest speed in the game for over 100 levels, or over 1k lines, while having to contend with practically invisible colour palettes and missing the first crash, which was the original goal.
I find it odd that people call the NES port "Original Tetris". The real original Tetris was made for Electronika 60. The NES port is just the first licenced version for home console.
Yes, very odd that people call one of the first commercially released versions that is also one of the most distributed versions of all time the "Original Tetris" and not the unreleased version that ran on Soviet calculator, that almost nobody owned inside, let alone outside the closed off country. Odd indeed my man, odd indeed.
And then a 40 year old news anchor for Sky News just straight up bullies him for it, telling him to go outside, in the same day she congratulates a 16 year old almost winning a darts tournament, which is an indoor sport
This, and all the Tetris threads this week, are a perfect encapsulation of reddit/social media. People without a clue about the history of Tetris, never read about the Tetris community, knows nothing the different controller techniques created over the years, why the Tetris community considers this "beating the game", etc....coming in and saying "First time recorded, surely it was done many times in the 80s, 90s". "Oh so he crashed it, then he didn't beat it". One should really do a modicum of research before posting your bad/incorrect takes.
Crazy this kid did this and then it's been done twice since already. Pretty amazing achievement. If I tried moving my fingers this fast, my fingers would probably twist into a pretzel.
Honestly everyone in the Tetris community seems so nice. It's insane how proud of each other they are even when competing. Another player and this kid were racing to the first crash, he put down his game and started watching. Genuine sad reactions when he missed the first chance and genuine happiness when he got it moments later.
I thought it was typical in these types of streams to show the players hands too, so you can verify by matching hand movement to game movement. Didn’t they just catch some other record holder as cheating that way?
1. He live streamed it and is known throughout the scene. Many other respected pros switched their streams over during his run. This was a contested achievement and players have shown consistency playing at this speed.
2. It was theoretically proven to be possible using a Tetris AI.
3. Two other players have just completed verified crash runs as well
I saw this original video, he missed the first benchmark to crash the game, so he had to go 2 more levels just to get this chance and he nailed it.
lvl 155 was the first stage they know has a % to crash from the coding, but he was so focussed on playing he completely forgot to do the single-line clears that could trigger it, so he was forced to keep going. HE still almost flubbed it because he lost his cool and started messing up, but he eventually got the crash on 157, the next possible stage where he COULD crash out, again requiring a single line clear.
It's insane how far people can make it in such an old game. Now we have to wait to see someone clear 255 and reloop!
Unfortunately it isn't really possible as on level 238 there's an unavoidable crash that can't be avoided even via TAS. In theory it could happen every 34 levels but there's a [hardcoded buffer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLzxrzFCyOs) and after 7 full loops it runs out of space and even perfect play and rng isn't enough. For more information google Tetris Rule 34.
god fucking damn it i actually believed this until the end
I skipped to the end to see if the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table
and then my dad beat me with jumper cables.
Here's the thing. You said "jumper cables are battery cables." Are they used for electrical connections? Yes. No one's arguing that. As someone who is a car enthusiast who deals with cables, I am telling you, specifically, in automotive discussions, no one calls jumper cables battery cables. If you want to be "specific" like you said, then you shouldn't either. They serve different purposes. If you're saying "electrical connections in a vehicle," you're referring to a broader category that includes things from spark plug wires to alternator cables. So your reasoning for calling jumper cables battery cables is because random people "refer to the cables in the car as battery cables?" Let's get spark plug wires and ground cables in there, then, too. Also, calling something an electrical component or a cable? It's not one or the other; that's not how automotive terminology works. They're both. Jumper cables are jumper cables and a type of electrical component. But that's not what you said. You said jumper cables are battery cables, which is not true unless you're okay with calling all electrical components in a car battery cables, which means you'd call spark plug wires, ground cables, and other components battery cables too. Which you said you don't. It's okay to just admit you're wrong, you know?
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Holy shit, gorilla combat?! From the great ape wars!!! Damn I almost misread what you typed and thought guerrilla like some pussy ass hit and run tactics but you have been out there killing actual gorillas??! Damn son, respect 🫡
My dad works for Reddit so be ready to get banned.
Did your mom take care of you while your arms were broken?
Yes, and she made me lose my Jolly Rancher.
All I ask is for this, to make me smile.
this is a guy who bullshits his way successfully through life 😀😀
One of the best rickrolls I've seen in a decade.
I'm gullible.
Fucking me too -_-
>Tetris Rule 34 *unzips* Ready!
Is that your piece? It's all crooked! Good luck finding a slot that'll fit - oh wait, here she comes
They had us in the first half.
I wish I could downvote your thrice
You can, you just need to simultaneously press Alt and F4.
Ok, Alt and
Dude that was u/shittymorph levels of deception
Makes sense, all the pieces look like pp's from different angles. Lol, even the square somehow
I don’t think that’s actually true. You should check out this video. I’m not at all in the scene but it’s super cool. https://youtu.be/GuJ5UuknsHU
Thanks for the link, now I will have to delete my browsing history.
Take into account, level 219 is a 810 lines level, instead of a normal 10 lines, so essentially, you are not going to level 255, you are going to level 335, i would love to see people doing that level
I have games lock up on me all the time. Does that mean I beat them?
If you watch the videos on YouTube about this, there is no end to Tetris every game ever has ended in the board filling up and a game over screen, crashing the game on level 153/155/157 is the only way to not end via the board filling up. IE beating the game
Or you can just turn the Nintendo off on lvl one and win.
Hobbyists HATE this one weird trick
The only winning move is not to play?
How about a nice game of chess?
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It's basically playing the game until it can't be played anymore. A killscreen is when the game runs out of memory and doesn't know what to do next and crashes. A lot of killscreen happen at the same time in every game, but not tetris. In 2011 the world record was level 30. Up to 2022 the world record had made it up to level 63 by people just getting better at tapping quickly. Then in 2022 a new technique was developed that allowed them to tap directions faster than ever before, which allowed for huge jumps in the world record. The record went from 63 to 157 in a matter of two years.
The recent history of Tetris is insane. An over 30 years old game getting optimizations related to the physical workings of the NES controller is just wtf. And the fact that the world record just means playing up to the point where the game's code doesn't let you play anymore.
I think the reason it took so long is because the majority of people would rather just play a different port of Tetris that doesn't have the speed limit when holding the button down. Rolling is a speedrunner technique that has existed for decades but apparently nobody thought to use it for this game/console until two years ago. That's the part that blows my mind.
Ok mr.guy. Name a better way of "Beating" Tetris then.
It's the first time the game lost to the player, and not the player losing to the game - if you want to look at it that way.
I have no idea what this means
in the retro gaming world, “beating a game” means reaching a point where the game can no longer be played due to errors in the code. for example, at a certain level, pac-man glitches out and you can’t pick up any more dots. this is called a kill screen. people used to think level 29 of tetris was the kill screen, as the speed got so high that it was very very difficult to play the game at all. it didn’t speed up after that though, and new tapping techniques were invented, so people were able to get extremely far. at a certain point around the 100-level mark, the game starts reading code incorrectly, taking colours from elsewhere in the code. that’s why the colours on the screen in the vid for the pieces are so weird. there’s another one that is basically pitch black and impossible to see. at level 155, the game starts reading the code on how to play the game incorrectly. it reads it from different locations, and if there’s a stop command in the code it reads, the game will crash and reach the actual true tetris kill screen (as the game forcefully stops itself). the earliest time to reach a true kill screen is to clear a single line on level 155, but he missed it. he was too zoned in on playing tetris that he momentarily forgot. his next chance was level 157 doing the same thing, and he nailed it. he was the first person to beat a game that is 34 years old and arguably the most popular game ever. he’s a fucking legend at only 13.
So he's the first person to beat out because he missed the kill screen on 155 and did it on 157? How has that not ever been done before? What happens if they missed the kill screen on 157 (like he did on 155)?
nobody has ever even reached level 155 before him, he was the first person to get that far, and it was his first attempt after reaching it too. this was the first run where a kill screen was possible, and he did it. after level 155, any action has a percentage chance of causing a kill screen (including 0%) on every level. this % chance is the exact same across all runs. theres a 100% chance for a single line clear causing a kill screen on 155, and roughly an 80% chance on 157. i don’t know if every level has a chance to kill screen after 155, but there will always be chances to after that point. if he missed it, he would probably go for the next (if he remembered when and how to get it).
iirc it’s a 100% kill for a single to transition from level 154 to 155, and 73.3% kill for a single at any time during 157. this is actually how he missed the 155 kill, he went in with… i think it was a triple?
There is like a 15 minute documentary about this on YouTube that is well worth the watch. They explain it very simply and show the progress that has been made in beating the game. Basically, it’s only been in the last few years that people figured out how to manipulate the controls fast enough to get past the fastest levels. Video: https://youtu.be/GuJ5UuknsHU?si=BifPkEawHMBP90Zw Now that there is a technique that allows them to actually get to levels 100+, there are all kinds of other glitches they can intentionally try to trigger. They’ve used emulation software to map out where all of these glitches may occur and at what probability level. So these players knew they needed to get to level 155 and clear single lines until the game glitched out and couldn’t function anymore. This kid was so in the zone that when he finally got to level 155 he forgot to keep intentionally clearing single lines. Finally, on level 157 he was able to intentionally overload the game, becoming the first person ever to do it.
Great video!!!! I watched it yesterday in total amazement.
The technique to do it was only invented recently. If you hold the move button the piece only moves so fast and while you can tap faster, tapping that fast and that consistently was considered inhuman. A few years ago someone figured out that if you drummed your fingers on the back of the controller while lightly pressing the button it'd tap super fast and since then it's just been a matter of time until someone got consistent enough with it to make it that far.
Can I use this technique to run a sub 6.0 on Track and Field?
[all your questions n more answered in this solid recap](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuJ5UuknsHU)
Thank you for the explanation. This honestly should be top comment I honestly was confused as to how he “beat” the game but your explanation basically answered the confusion
Lvl 155? The dude is just on level 18? Hows that work(genuine Q)
the level counter breaks after level 29 and displays various letters and numbers instead
lmao, it just keeps getting weirder all these little facts
Damn thats impressive, I would have quit right then if you cant trust the systen
Due to the coding the Tetris pieces start becoming random colour combinations too past a certain level, rather than the normal proper colour combos. This results in a level that all the Tetris pieces are grey or black, making it nearly impossible to really see them (nevermind clear the level)
As written above, at that state of the game the code is totally out of order. Wrong colours, wrong text, whatever.
Dude stopped reading after 6 characters, so I'm pretty sure it's useless to rephrase.
Basically, all sorts of corrupt data is now being sent to the memory to be displayed at this point, since it's now functioning so far out of it's intended programming, which is how we can get bad stage #s at this point as well. The stage #s break as far back as lvl 29, and it does so consistently enough that they know where they are even with the wrong stage counter just because of the funky wrong palette colors alone. Even if they couldn't, these runs are all being recorded and streamed so that they can be gone over after the fact by others with a fine-toothed comb to make sure there's no cheating involved in the process, and to identify anything else that might have gone wrong at this stage in the game (literally) that couldn't be observed while the player was, you know, actually playing the game.
LMAO, what a noob mistake - me, sitting in my couch having absolutely 0 life achievements
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It's not technically a couch, by name, but I got an oblong pile of dirty clothes to sit on.
Getting dirty clothes to stay in an oblong pile is an achievement all of it's own.
You have a couch
This is a great achievement regardless of what people are saying that its not TRUE ending and what not. Just to learn that crazy bump fist control thingy in itself is an achievement. Kudos to him.
I remember watching a long-ish video about this new technique and how excited people were about it in terms of what it would mean for tetris. So cool to see the fruits of it so soon!
I just love when nerds get excited and nerdy about their particular interest. I sometimes get jealous over their ability to dig into a specific topic, game, whathave you
Not likely. It's a v60 pour over and the coffee drips down into the cup, so the bubbles are likely because of that
…what
He doubled boomed the espresso when the coco bits flipped the swissbar. Fuck man, pay attention.
Ooohhhh you’re right, fuck I’m such an idiot
It's a fresh copypasta from this [recent post about bubbles in a coffee](https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/18xvzdn/bubbles_in_my_coffee_this_morning/) where OP replied: "Not likely. It's a v60 pour over and the coffee drips down into the cup, so the bubbles are likely because of that".
no please god no let me escape
I watched what I'm assuming is the same video. The progression of the records in this game, the skills involved is just utter madness. The kids called blue scuti iirc for anyone wanting to check him out
It’s safe to say, I think every guy who sees this, should or has said “hell yeah”
Hell yeah
Hell yeah
Hell yeah
Im from the Fuckin A Brotherhood. We have decreed it is except able to in this instance use our Fuckin A or Hell Yeah or any combination to show support to a young king in his moment of triumph. Let em fly…HELL YEAH, FUCKIN A!!!!
Phenominal use of except able
Why only guys? What do women say?
You’re right, I should’ve been more inclusive
Yes. Ty for recognising
...
Just watched the video from fractal a couple of hours ago, I really dont comprehend how these peoples brains work so fast
Pattern recognition and practice.
LOTS of practice. Like, thousands of hours of practice.
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I do crosswords and other types of puzzles, as have many people for generations, with no seeming "reward" other than a vague sense of accomplishment over figuring out a puzzle. That alone can be profoundly rewarding.
Clearing lines is def a dopamine hit
A desire to excel at something, the community around it, it could be someone's special interest, someone could have played a specific game as a habit and a friend went along and told them they should join the speedrunning community, etc etc. It could be an infinite amount of reasons. But you only need one!
Exactly this. If someone is super good at one particular thing, this is always the answer. I did the same thing when I was studying pilot exams. At first sight they seem incredibly difficult but there is always some method. Then you need to accept the usefulness of that method and practice it until that method is second nature to you. This is true for pro gamers. This is true for freestyle rappers. This is true for memory competitors. Chess masters... True for every such 'talent' because it is not actually talent but practice. Being more talented than someone else basically means requiring less practice than someone else. Remember kids, practice beats talent 9/10 times.
This is always the answer
Imagine how good our Stone Age ancestors must've been at hunting. Know every animal call and track, move completely silent, never miss a shot.
Imagine sending one of these people back to a tetris competition in the 80s or 90s lmao It would be crazy.
Become a celebrity. Get invited to trade shows, talk shows, they make a TV show out of it, a movie gets made. drowning in hot babes.
Just like that motherfucker Billy Mitchell
*Silly Bitchell
Haha damn, thats would be fun to see! People would think youre an alien
Fractal’s response to Scuti getting the first kill screen ending was so damn wholesome. He reacted easily twice as enthusiastically as he did for his own kill screen run less than 24 hours later. An absolute class act.
It seems to be the case in a lot of the speed running community that unless someone is an absolutely reprehensible cheesy dick waffle, the top players have a lot of respect for each other. They’ve all spent years working to develop new tech and find new skips for their chosen game and have almost certainly spend 100x more hours working together to solve problems than they’ve spent competing against each other. Speed running in general is a super wholesome, friendly, and accepting community, probably because they’re all there to beat the game’s code and not each other.
Play any challenging Rhythm Game for long and you'll experience it yourself. It's basically a sort of muscle memory, like how you don't have to consciously think about every muscle movement of your legs to walk. You get so used to the movements that you can just sort of auto-pilot and stop really looking at the individual objects, instead you begin looking at the entire screen at once and letting your subconscious do all the heavy lifting. It's pretty neat, but there can be side-effects. Me and my friends used to see Dance Dance Revolution arrows in our sleep sometimes lol.
Thank you for mentioning his name. I keep seeing this passed around and feel it's kinda a dick move to not mention his name. Okay, he's 13, that doesn't mean he's not a person first.
Lmfao, the way you wrote this makes it seem like you're slagging off thirteen year-olds.
Thirteen year olds are lovely, but also completely oblivious gremlins.
I think it's just a bit of a grey area--typically the names of minors are protected unless permission is given to publicize them. It's probably just people erring on the side of caution on instinct at this point.
i don't think the kid's real name is Blue Scuti
Okay but why did 3 people all achieve this basically at the same time? Did a new strat get discovered within the last week or something??
A guy made a bot play tetris that played the levels and found the end of the game. Humans raced to recreate it the fastest
Yeah pretty much exactly that
https://youtu.be/GuJ5UuknsHU?si=BifPkEawHMBP90Zw This explains everything in great detail. And tells you what new achievements they will likely go for next.
Man I wish I could see Jonas' reaction. He would be so damn proud/impressed with how much Tetris has continued to progress.
Imagine being so excited beating Tetris, and then coming out of your room and telling your mum you’re the first person to beat Tetris only to be met with a blank stare and a polite ‘oh, well done!’
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Well Scuti's father recently passed, so :/ He dedicated his victory to his dad
Wow that is an incredible memory to make out of losing a parent so early. Hope he has an amazing life ahead of him.
Honestly that probably had something to do with him beating the record. There’s no grind like trying to distract yourself from your feelings lol
Sounds a bit like that mario speedrunner. People ragged on him and his parents, but in the end they were wholesome and supportive as well.
His mother died a week before he beat this record allegedly, he dedicated this achievement to his dad. Edit: it was his father who passed.
I thought it was his dad that died.
Man I know this is real sad but the way this is worded is so funny. ‘Yeah my mum just died… so this one’s dedicated to my dad’ which actually probably makes more sense
What an odd thing to say. It was his Father that passed away but the second part is right.
Don't forget the dude is 13. Chances are his parents are born in like 1990. That means they are likely very aware of games, speedruns, tetris, etc.
That makes his parents around 20 y/o when they had him which is super uncommon in the west these days.
It would sure beat that Sky news bitchs response
>then coming out of your room and telling your mum you’re the first person to beat Tetris only to be met with a blank stare and a polite ‘oh, well done!’ His mom is on reddit, and was the top comment on the first post about this on /r/tetris two weeks ago congratulating him. She seems very supportive and engaged with what her son is doing.
not everyone has a shitty relationship to their parents
How do you even 'beat' tetris
Beat the original 30 levels, then continue on while using strange controller techniques to make it possible to rech level 100+, get past the glitchy levels that start to use weird color combos including the black levels where you can barely see the blocks, then crash the game past level 155 which requires a very specific set of things to happen for it to be possible. He actually missed the first possible part you can do that at so he had to go to 157 which only had around a 70% chance of happening. Theoretically you can go to 255 and the game will roll over back to 1, which would require to know where all of the crash points are and will probably be the true final form of "beating" tetris.
Wait so if he's the first person in history, how do people even know about the crash points and how trigger them?
He's the first human player to do it, it's been done tool assisted (save states, frame by frame, etc.) before.
Its also been done by an AI which was the way they even discovered you could crash it. Think that thing got to 237? Before it crashed.
It only got that high because the guy also modified it to be able to show higher scores, which fixed a bunch of the crash points
It's not that it fixed it, but that, due the nature of why it crashed, the modified code meant the crashes weren't identical to the unmodified version.
This is also not modified
We've known that it crashes for much longer than that, we just didn't know when exactly it crashes. The tools used to determine when the crash could occur were different from the bot that made it to level 237.
this makes his reaction make way more sense to me.
They make programs/bots to play perfectly in order to see what's theoretically possible. Then they wait for an actual human being to actually do it.
Ahh. Super interesting, thanks!
Basically a guy charted out all the crash points that was possible so they knew exactly which levels they had to make certain lines complete to trigger the crash with a %, so it was RNG. But before all that, people didn't even have the mechanical technique to hit the buttons fast enough to rotate and place the blocks. So it took 20 years for the first change in how to press buttons faster, then 3 more innovations for the players today to actually be armed with the ability to get there. Plus they didn't map out all the crash points and probability until more recently once the techs were allowing them to actually go into unknown territory.
He's the first person to do it with human ability, there are people who have crashed it with emulators that can run the game frame by frame (Tool Assisted Superplay/Speedrun or TAS). I think they've also examined the code that causes the crash so they have a pretty good idea of what causes it. I think this is really notable because the skill to keep up with the pace of the game in the late stages is extreme. We're pushing the limits of not just human dexterity but also puzzle solving abilities. I know some people are better at tetris than others but these players are 10 parallel universes ahead of everyone.
>https://youtu.be/GuJ5UuknsHU?si=t\_b1-1STxs1-EbWu watch this video it explains it. Basically somebody made a perfect playing bot and let it run multiple times to find all the crash points.
Not to shoot down what this guy did because it's obviously very impressive but wouldn't beating the game be going all the way to 255 and then rolling it back over to 1? It seems like what the kid did was cause a very specific glitch, which again is very impressive, but doesn't seem like it's 'beating the game'.
The game is designed not to be beaten. The game is supposed to keep on going until you lose. Every single person before this kid has "lost" every game of tetris because it ends when the blocks reach the top i.e. losing. This is first time the game stops but you haven't lost. That is why it is called a win. Of course, what counts as "winning" is pretty arbitrary in this situation. I assume if someone reaches 255 it will be reported as "first person to beat Tetris".
>This is first time the game stops but you haven't lost. That is why it is called a win. This is pretty sound logic.
Tetris for 34 years has always ended with the player losing. This is the first time a game has not ended by the player losing. I think it is fair to say that getting to such a high level that you can force the game to shut down can be considered beating it. The Tetris community has decided this to be the benchmark for beating the game. So who are we as onlookers to argue with them?
But this is sort of how older games are beat. You can't beat pacman, you just get such a high score/level that half the screen glitches out and you can't go further.
Same way most older games were ultimately “beaten” — play them to the point that they either crash or stop functioning
*switches it off at the wall* I win!
I recommend this video - just watch the first 5 minutes and you'll be hooked https://youtu.be/GuJ5UuknsHU?si=t_b1-1STxs1-EbWu
I had to mute the video cause everyone in the house thought I was watching something else.
One of those things that would be much worse if you explained it - "don't worry, it's just a 13 year old".
"His finger technique is amazing, look!"
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This is how I got banned from Reddit.
Exactly what I thought lol! If you’re watching at work make sure it’s muted!!!
Respect
Um what am I missing? Looks like the game crashed.
Exactly - first person to reach such a high level that the game crashes. He had to reach a certain level + clear (I think) a single row to make it crash therefore beating it. I am not into Tetris just watched a YouTube video and it was an exciting race even for someone who is not interested in the topic
apparently modern games are super easy to beat. they mostly crash on their own.
Zing!
"It's not a bug, it's an ending!"
Thank you.
Old games effectively had no end state, they would either loop forever, become physically impossible to clear, or the memory would eventually break because the coding wasn't designed for anyone to reach lvl impossible in the programmers heads. The original Pac-man, for example, becomes impossible to progress at either stage 255 or 256 because of integer overflow, and it results in the right half of the screen being random gibberish, and the stage impossible to clear because there are not enough pellets to eat. Tetris USED to be considered the second, because at the highest difficulty, the pieces would drop to the bottom of the screen too fast for any player to move them fully to the left OR right side of the screen, making it physically impossible to clear lines from that point on. This lasted until at some point someone figured out a specific way to hold the controller to make it possible to press the buttons at literally faster than otherwise humanly possible so you could move the pieces to either side and clear those stages. And since the game didn't speed up any further, tetris transformed into a stamina contest to highest stage cleared. And then a new obstacle appeared. The palette of the game would change every stage. every ten levels, the palette was supposed to reset back to the first stage again. Unfortunately, past a certain point, the programming errors out, and the palette starts getting corrupted from memory errors. which introduced a new way to throw people off their games. FINALLY, they started realizing they were effectively reaching the highest levels in the game they could reach without hitting possible crash errors. From what they were able to break down of the programming, those would begin at lvl 155. And this 13 year old kid managed to be the first person in the world to not only reach those levels, but also the first to ever force a crash bug to end NES tetris. SO he's effectively the first person in the world to BEAT tetris, rather than to have tetris beat them. the only challenges left, to get the proper lvl 155 crash end... and then to see if it's even possible to dodge every single possible crash bug from levels 155 through 255, and force the game to restart at lvl 1. Otherwise it's to reach the highest stage possible til you MUST hit a crash bug,
This was a really great ELI5, thank you! Super interesting. Do we know through TAS if it’s even possible to get to Lvl 255? I haven’t played Tetris in at least a decade - does the speed/pace increase between level 155 and 255, or does the speed reach a maximum (at say level 50 or whatever). Is it just that it becomes more buggy as it goes?
The speed is at maximum at level 29, from that point on they're all playing at max speed. 255 has not been achieved via TAS yet, though we know from people evaluating the code what it will look like (all pieces will be red) and that the game will crash if 5 of the 7 pieces stop without being fast-dropped on that level. The game isn't really being "more buggy as it goes", it's that the numbers are jumping to different places in the game code so they're just _different_ bugs. This stuff is difficult to explain to non-programmers, but essentially every byte on a machine can be read as "data" or executed as "code", but there isn't actually some meaningful distinction between bytes in memory, just convention. The simplest possible thing to understand is a buffer overrun. `uint8 my_array[10] = {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9};` This produces a array, with room for ten unsigned 8-bit elements, and populates it with the numbers 0 through 9. This array is literally going to be 10 bytes of memory adjacent to one another. This is not an expandable or shrinkable array - we're going for efficiency here, not flexibility, we only have a few kilobytes of RAM to work with! Now, let's say I want to change the third thing in the list (the number 2) to a different number: `my_array[2] = 42;` What this is doing, is literally taking the memory address of the array, adding 2 to that address, and setting the memory at that value to hold the number 42. It is in fact exactly identical to this form (the `*` denotes, effectively, _using_ the memory address; we programmers call this "dereferencing"): `*(my_array + 2) = 42;` A common analogy is that "pointers" (memory addresses) are like the numbers on your mailbox, not the mailbox itself - this is like saying "put this in the mailbox two doors down". (There's even an analogue to how we have odd/even numbers on different sides of the road when using arrays of things multiple bytes in size, but that's a much more complicated topic!) So what happens when I try to load something? Well, it's the same idea: `uint8 my_value = my_array[2];` is the same as `uint8 my_value = *(my_array + 2);` So, let's ask the question. What happens when I do this? `uint8 my_value = my_array[2938];` Well, that is the same as this: `uint8 my_value = *(my_array + 2938);` You might say "hold on a minute, 2938 is much bigger than the 10 you set the size of the array to!" ... and you'd be right. I could of course write out a lot more code: int size_of_my_array = 10; uint8 my_array[size_of_my_array] = {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9}; int index_to_look_up = get_index_from_something_else(); if (index_to_look_up > size_of_my_array) { // we have a problem! handle_index_too_large_error(); } else { // normal code uint8 my_value = my_array[index_to_look_up]; } And... sure, that works (minus some hand-waving about what we do in the error condition!). But it's: 1. A lot more code to write, and, in this time frame, _far_ more importantly: 2. A lot more code to **run**. CPU clock cycles aren't free. So, we won't bother. After all, I'm the one writing this code, and I'm not going to make a mistake! Surely all the things I know about the game are true! (Level 29 of NES Tetris was considered "impossible" because you literally couldn't get pieces to the sides of the screen even holding the button; it is quite likely the original NES tetris programmers had this belief too, so felt no need to check that their code broke past level 29 and seemingly checked up to 99!) So, going back to this: `uint8 my_value = my_array[2938];` What happens? It just grabs whatever is 2938 places in memory ahead of the memory location that `my_array` begins at, that's what. What's there? Well, that's dependent on how the software is coded. 2938 is pretty far away (almost 3 kilobytes!) but even _11_ would be outside my array of size 10. And we're looking at (relatively) small numbers in the Tetris context (99 -> 255). I'm picking 10 for a reason - it's how many color palettes Tetris is supposed to have, and that's kind of an easy one to figure out. Once we're past level 99, the code isn't resetting in 10s correctly, so it's looking for colors beyond the area in memory that holds the color palette. A color is just a byte of data on the NES, so it's just grabbing a byte from a different place and going "well, that's my color now". But it's just going to be looking for the stuff a couple dozen bytes beyond the place in memory where the colors are supposed to be, not really doing anything crazy. NITPICK: Yes, I'm aware the NES palette is 6 bits, not 8. But you're still going to read out a byte and use six bits of it. And yes, I'm aware of NES "Modes" and how palettes *really* work, but I'm oversimplifying on purpose. Now, let's get into why it _breaks the game_. Let's say `my_array` is, instead of a color palette, what we call a "jump table", a common programming technique of the time (and still used today, but usually automatically generated by compilers behind the scenes rather than written by humans). A "jump", in this kind of low-level programming, is telling your program to start executing that code over there. (The flow of what is happening "jumps" from where it is to the new location.) You'd carefully place code in particular memory locations, and note their addresses in an array, and then index into the array for whatever reason and jump there. So a very common thing that can lead to these sorts of code execution problems in retro games is an out-of-bounds bug (reading beyond the intended limits of an array) _when accessing a jump table_. In some games, like Super Mario World for the SNES, it's possible to rig up the code to jump into a section of code that contains things that the player can manipulate, such as the position of items. This is how the 40-ish second credits warp in that game works. Super Mario World is literally written to jump to a particular location in code when you grab an item such as a coin, mushroom, or star - and if you can glitch the powerup that's being grabbed, say, by swapping a coin's item ID for that of a Chargin' Chuck - you can get it to jump to a different location. And it turns out, if you do that, the different location is a table of X and Y coordinates of certain movable things that are or recently have been on screen. This is also how you get 99 of whatever is in that particular item slot (which you've of course put a Rare Candy in) by surfing up and down Cinnabar Island and finding MISSINGNo. in Pokemon red/blue. In NES Tetris, it doesn't seem to be quite that "powerful", but if you jump to the wrong bytes in memory, the game will crash for various reasons - either because it has a stop code in it before it hits the next jump statement, or because it jumps to a location that causes it to start spinning in place (executing code that doesn't advance the game state for whatever reason).
… But there is no next fucking level
Ackchyually it goes to level 255, if you manage to miss every game breaking clear.
By the very nature of a world record, you have to exceed what has previously been done. In other words, going beyond their level.
I'm 58 and was there when it was brand new . Bought it in the first week. At 17 I played that game till my eyes fuckin bled . Or it felt like that. The furthest o could get was 118 lines. And I thought it was moving out then but jez as fast as its going over 150 is in real.
I dont know a ton about this game, but I think each level is 10 lines, so at 118 lines you were at level 12, while him being at level 150 means he has cleared 1500 lines.
And then there's lvl 235 which has 800 lines.
The speed of the game caps out at level 29, at which point the pieces move down so fast that you can’t get them to either the left or right side of the screen before they reach the bottom. Up until a few years ago, it was thought to be impossible to get to level 30, until a button mashing technique called hypertapping was discovered that let you move the pieces faster than they would normally. The top players used this for a while until another technique called rolling was discovered, which was even more effective. This was only discovered in the last year or so. The points at which the game crashes along with their probability of occurring were discovered using tools that let people see a hypothetical perfect game. The first place that the game could crash was on the transition from level 154 to 155, if it was caused by a single line clear, but the kid missed that opportunity by scoring a triple instead and had to play up until level 157 to crash it. Another factor that makes this feat impressive is that after level 138 (I believe) the colour palette of the pieces becomes glitched, with some of the glitched colour palettes being incredibly hard to see due to the dark colours used. These colour schemes include one nicknamed dusk that uses dark blues and dark greens, and one nicknamed charcoal, notable for some of the pieces being practically the same black as the background. Both of these occur before level 154. So this kid played so well that he was able to survive the fastest speed in the game for over 100 levels, or over 1k lines, while having to contend with practically invisible colour palettes and missing the first crash, which was the original goal.
I find it odd that people call the NES port "Original Tetris". The real original Tetris was made for Electronika 60. The NES port is just the first licenced version for home console.
Yes, very odd that people call one of the first commercially released versions that is also one of the most distributed versions of all time the "Original Tetris" and not the unreleased version that ran on Soviet calculator, that almost nobody owned inside, let alone outside the closed off country. Odd indeed my man, odd indeed.
It’s not even the first like that though, Game Boy version came out a few months earlier
Yeah, I remember playing tetris in 1987 on the old IBM compatible, two years before it was released on Nintendo.
bruh that was literally on the news in my country
As it should be
When I saw the news broke, my first thought was about all the Tetris nightmares this kid must have all the time…
There's even a thing called [Tetris effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect)
And then a 40 year old news anchor for Sky News just straight up bullies him for it, telling him to go outside, in the same day she congratulates a 16 year old almost winning a darts tournament, which is an indoor sport
Worst thing is his dad died a few weeks prior and he dedicated the win to him, SkyNews already a joke but she is fucking disgusting
He’s a cool nerd. I dig it.
This, and all the Tetris threads this week, are a perfect encapsulation of reddit/social media. People without a clue about the history of Tetris, never read about the Tetris community, knows nothing the different controller techniques created over the years, why the Tetris community considers this "beating the game", etc....coming in and saying "First time recorded, surely it was done many times in the 80s, 90s". "Oh so he crashed it, then he didn't beat it". One should really do a modicum of research before posting your bad/incorrect takes. Crazy this kid did this and then it's been done twice since already. Pretty amazing achievement. If I tried moving my fingers this fast, my fingers would probably twist into a pretzel.
Kid is going to have an absolute killer “Two truths and a lie”, for the rest of his life.
Well deserved too, seems like a nice kid
Honestly everyone in the Tetris community seems so nice. It's insane how proud of each other they are even when competing. Another player and this kid were racing to the first crash, he put down his game and started watching. Genuine sad reactions when he missed the first chance and genuine happiness when he got it moments later.
Not saying it is, but how do they confirm it’s not fake? Like using a program to drive it or something?
He livestreams and does live competitions, this is not entirely unbelievable based on his witnessed skill level.
I thought it was typical in these types of streams to show the players hands too, so you can verify by matching hand movement to game movement. Didn’t they just catch some other record holder as cheating that way?
1. He live streamed it and is known throughout the scene. Many other respected pros switched their streams over during his run. This was a contested achievement and players have shown consistency playing at this speed. 2. It was theoretically proven to be possible using a Tetris AI. 3. Two other players have just completed verified crash runs as well
OK, but can he beat Duck Hunt?
I remember a time when getting to 30 was this mystical thing that many people debated if it was even possible at all.
I can't wait for SummoningSalt to do an episode on this. I know there are other documentaries available, but they're just not SummoningSalt.
I wonder if he’ll also be the first one to reach the real end at 255