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Watch a 13-year-old become the first person to ever beat Classic Tetris (www.polygon.com)

submitted 10 months ago by ooli@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world

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[-] Endorkend@kbin.social 171 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] ttsci@lemmy.world 137 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.

[-] LogicalDrivel@sopuli.xyz 21 points 10 months ago

Thanks for the links. I went to watch and he's actually live right now playing some tetris. Dudes a machine.

[-] grue@lemmy.world 13 points 10 months ago

He was only on level 18 though, LOL

spoiler

(Yes, I know it rolled over and went to weird hexadecimal levels before that.)

[-] LastYearsPumpkin@feddit.ch 2 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] Jackthelad@lemmy.world 39 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] Endorkend@kbin.social 32 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] xkforce@lemmy.world 23 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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

[-] Endorkend@kbin.social 16 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] Zahille7@lemmy.world 58 points 10 months ago

You can beat Tetris?

[-] 0110010001100010@lemmy.world 82 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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/

[-] 9cpluss@lemmy.world 20 points 10 months ago

Here is a good video explaining it

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

[-] smeg@feddit.uk 5 points 10 months ago

That was a very interesting watch, cheers!

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 44 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] HeapOfDogs@lemmy.world 15 points 10 months ago

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

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 15 points 10 months ago

iPhone, unfortunately. Stupid walled garden.

[-] michaelkovacs98@mastodon.social 6 points 10 months ago

you can get the Delta emulator using the Alt Store on iOS

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago

I appreciate the advice and I'll definitely look into it, but I really shouldn't have to look into it or run an emulator. If the company that owns Teris (who now sue anyone trying to put out a similar game) just put out a simple version of Tetris with an ad banner at the bottom, they would make serious bank from all of us older people who grew up playing it constantly. They would probably even make a decent amount of money if they charged for it up front.

There is an official Tetris phone game. It's shit. There's no normal Tetris mode on it. I really don't understand.

[-] shinratdr@lemmy.ca 2 points 10 months ago

https://retrogamesbot.com/

[-] aiden@lemm.ee 14 points 10 months ago

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

[-] Ultraviolet@lemmy.world 10 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] SwallowsDick@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

Sounds interesting, can you elaborate?

[-] Ultraviolet@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago

The difficulty curve in Tetris has a few different possible knobs to adjust as the levels go up, generally involving how much of a delay you have on certain events. The most obvious is gravity, which is how many frames it takes to fall one space (or, to ramp that up further, how many spaces it falls per frame), but the relevant one here is lock delay. This is the amount of time between the piece landing and the player losing control over the piece. Low lock delay like you have on NES tends to make small mistakes a lot more punishing. High lock delay lets you reposition a piece shortly after it falls. Modern Tetris has a small but highly controversial change to the lock delay logic: rotating a piece resets the timer. This means you can spam the rotate button to think about where to place a piece indefinitely, a technique called infinite spin. Presumably this was done with timed and battle modes in mind, where this isn't really an advantage because it's always better to play quickly, but in endless it has no meaningful cost. So leaderboards started to get pretty grotesque, with top scoring games dragging on for dozens of hours. Something had to be done about it, and shifting focus entirely to timed and line limited modes was the choice they made for better or worse.

[-] Suburbanl3g3nd 3 points 10 months ago

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

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

Neat! I think the screen would be too small for my old eyes though.

[-] Speculater@lemmy.world 41 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago

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

[-] deweydecibel@lemmy.world 39 points 10 months ago

Apparently this kids dad died a week earlier and he decided the video to him.

[-] blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 24 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.

[-] Snowpix@lemmy.ca 38 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

That makes sense. Thanks for the extra info.

[-] Metz@lemmy.world 32 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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

[-] effward@lemmy.world 10 points 10 months ago

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?

[-] dQw4w9WgXcQ@lemm.ee 10 points 10 months ago

I'm guessing the gloves provide low and consistent friction theoughout the game. It's probably easy to get either sweaty or dry fingers during a long run, which could probably ruin some precise movements.

It's just my guess, though.

[-] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 13 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] PsychedSy@sh.itjust.works 11 points 10 months ago

There's been a moving concept of the 'killscreen' in tetris. Pacman has a limit where the game isn't any longer playable. Tetris only got to a certain speed and was too fast to progress until new tech for hitting buttons were discovered. Recently, someone found out that after a certain level some conditions would crash the game so people have been racing to meet those conditions.

[-] Ultraviolet@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago

The crash was known, it's been reached by a TAS but no human had gotten far enough to trigger it. He was intentionally trying for the crash to be the first one to do it.

[-] calculuschild@lemm.ee 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Tetris doesn't really have an end. It just keeps going. So this is a very specific crash where if you get far enough into the game, it can't keep up with the player any more. You "beat" Tetris by playing so well you make the game break.

This is similar to getting pacman to crash by beating level 255 at which point incrementing the level goes past what can be stored and the data gets corrupted.