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.

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.

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

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

https://youtu.be/GuJ5UuknsHU?si=WNWVw5pc1shhSKya

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

It's like chess. They have to think multiple moves ahead.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Haha, he nearly passes out when he realizes he crashed the game. That kid is amazing.

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