Watch a 13-year-old become the first person to ever beat Classic Tetris
Watch a 13-year-old become the first person to ever beat Classic Tetris
34 years after the game came out, someone finally beat it
Why did Polygon include the CTWC video at the top of their page instead of BlueScuti's?
They are already stealing his views reposting his entire video with some bullshit commenting from them over the top of it and now Polygon is supporting that kind of behavior.
The kid did the work, give him the damn views.
Thanks for mentioning the original source! Here's BlueScuti's video, to save everyone else some searching. The moment he beats it is here, at 38:30.
Thanks for the links. I went to watch and he's actually live right now playing some tetris. Dudes a machine.
He was only on level 18 though, LOL
spoiler
(Yes, I know it rolled over and went to weird hexadecimal levels before that.)
This is the best comment in the thread. No muss, no fuss, just a link it the sauce and a timecode link to the actual event.
Thank you for your service.
It reminds me of if you look up a trailer on YouTube and the first results are usually a bunch of videos of people "reacting" to the trailer, with a stupid shocked face in the caption.
Yeah, and if the OG video was just a minute or so long, I get including it while "reporting" on it.
This kid did a 45 minute run, which CTWC included in their video in its entirety, their own contribution, being the intro and interview, are only a few minutes tacked on at each end.
It's infuriating.
It just goes to show you how low quality their journalism is. Didnt even bother finding the original source, just pulled the first video that came up in youtube search
That's what makes it extra messed up.
In the text of the article, they actually link to the kids video.
Yet the include of the page, they use that CTWC video.
So this isn't lazy or by accident, this is completely deliberate.
You can beat Tetris?
In this case, "beat" is causing the game to crash, lol. You can also roll the levels over (in theory) from 255 back to 0. The game gets glitchy at level 138 though so a human rolling over back to 0 seems fairly unlikely.
This is a great article I was reading earlier about it: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/01/someone-has-finally-beaten-nes-tetris/
Here is a good video explaining it
That was a very interesting watch, cheers!
Meanwhile, my wife got me an "official" Tetris handheld game for Christmas and not only does it only have 15 levels, but the music repeats once and then stops until you restart the game.
You know what I would love? A basic, no-frills Tetris game for my phone. I don't know why that is too much to ask for.
I don't know what phone you have but an nes emulator app and a Tetris ROM is totally a thing that's not too complex
Check out falling lightblocks. I'm not sure if it's on iPhone but on Android you have to get it from their website because Google removed it from the playstore because they got copyright claimed
Blame the Tetris Guideline. In the mid 2000s, they changed the rotation system, and under the new system, any player of intermediate skill can just play forever. Once you know the tricks to keeping a piece in play and building the stack in a way that you can always get a piece where you want it, you can't lose until you voluntarily lose. That was, needless to say, a bit broken for leaderboard purposes. So as a bandaid solution to that, the main mode was changed from endless to 150 lines.
I have an old Tetris Microcard that is brilliant. Mines an older version of something like this and I love it. Plus it fits in your wallet... https://www.amazon.com/Micro-Arcade-366-Tetris/dp/B07QC8DYTJ
Neat! I think the screen would be too small for my old eyes though.
I know how to play Tetris pretty well, but damn it if I couldn't follow just how fast you have to react at those last levels. By the time I see a piece on their screen and my brain says "box" they've placed 3 more pieces.
It's like chess. They have to think multiple moves ahead.
Apparently this kids dad died a week earlier and he decided the video to him.
Unsure how true, but Sauce: https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2024/01/03/blue-scuti-tetris-killscreen-video-stillwater-oklahoma/72097047007/
A 13-year-old Oklahoma boy became the first person to technically beat Tetris on the original 1988 Nintendo Entertainment System cartridge version. He dedicated his win to his dad, who died last month.
It looks like the game just crashed. And he looks happy rather than annoyed.
Is that what beating Tetris is? I thought it would maybe run out of cubes after a while, or something.
Crashing the game was in fact the goal. It was discovered by using a bot that the game would eventually bug out and start trying to read tile data from the RAM, which gave a chance for the game to crash. No human player had been able to reach this game crash until now, which is why it's a big deal. It's the first time someone has technically beaten Tetris, as normally every single player will eventually top out and lose either due to mistakes or bad luck with the pieces.
That makes sense. Thanks for the extra info.
It was posted yesterday with a different video that goes more into details what this is all about, the old records and how these were achieved and what the "true killscreen" (this crash) is, etc. I didn't think it would actually be that interesting, but I watched the whole thing and quite enjoyed it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuJ5UuknsHU
I saw the post yesterday, but didn't watch the video at the time.
Your comment convinced me to watch it, and, boy, was that more interesting than I expected.
One question remains: what are those gloves they are wearing? I get that it's something that helps with the rolling technique, but is it just for abrasion/chafing prevention? Or does it do something else?
I haven't read about the specifics of this Tetris crash, but usually what happens with these old games is that memory is very tightly packed, imagine you have a small version of Tetris that has 3 digits XYZ where X is the speed of the game, Y is the amount of lives and Z is the level you are in, so for example if you're in speed 5 with 8 lives on level 7 the number would be 587, if you go up one level it becomes 588, now on that example if you're on speed 9 with 9 lives on level 9, i.e. 999, and you go up one level the number becomes 1000, but because only the 3 last matter you're now on speed 0, with 0 lives on level 0, since speed zero means nothing moves you crashed the game.
Again, this is not exactly what happened here, but probably something similar where increasing a number overflew to the next one in memory and that caused some weird behaviour.
Yes, I completely understand that those games that ran on a shoestring can easily crash when some values are exceeded. What puzzles me is that I would have expected the player to be annoyed at his game crashing (of course simpler games on dedicated hardware didn't really get to crash all that much back then, so maybe that was seen as an achievement of sorts).
I suppose it's my lack of exposure to the console side of things, having gone from 8 bit PCs to the ubiquitous intel machines without ever using one of the dedicated gaming devices.
Thanks @ttsci
Haha, he nearly passes out when he realizes he crashed the game. That kid is amazing.
Is the Tetris on the original Gameboy not classic Tetris?
I completed that when I was a kid. I remember not having anyone to share they joy with, other than friends at school the day after!
I thought the same. My mom beat it and claimed there was a rocket ship. I didn't believe her until she made me sit by her and did it again.
And then all the rolling credits
Beat tetris but you have to listen to the music on loop until you beat it
Out of curiosity, is Tengen Tetris easier to beat? Does it scale differently?
TBF unlike adults, children have all the free time to master video games.
do they? It is hard to concentrate so long on something to be able to master it this way. As a child I couldnt do any thing requiring a little bit of concentration, even video game more than 2h... watchning tv mindlessly, I stull can do it for hours on end
No
Go on, give it a burl.
I'm pretty sure that many 13 yos beat the game when it came out. He isn't the "first"
Nope, reaching that screen of the game is a true first for any human.
Nope. There's a whole thing where a human can't move the joystick quick enough on full speed to clear the blocks so they invented a new method of tapping the joystick. This only got discovered in the last decade, and meant world record holders went from games at level 29 to games in the hundreds. This kid played until the game's memory couldn't cope anymore. That's now the competition, pushing it until it crashes and hoping it happens on a higher level than the last person. The only achievement beyond this is mid-200s level when the game would roll over to 0. But that's basically impossible because it'd crash far before that.