Teen achieves first NES Tetris “rebirth,” proves endless play is possible

Months ago, 13-year-old Willis “Blue Scuti” Gibson became the first person to “beat” NES Tetris, crashing the game after a 1,511-line, 157-level performance. Over the weekend, 16-year-old Michael “dogplayingtetris” Artiaga became the first to reach an even more impressive plateau in the game, looping past Level 255 and instantly rolling the game all the way back to the ultra-slow Level 0.

It took Artiaga a bit over 80 minutes and a full 3,300 cleared lines to finally achieve the game’s first near-mythical “rebirth” live in front of hundreds of Twitch viewers. And after a bit of celebration and recovery on the low levels, Artiaga managed to keep his rolled-over game going for another 40 minutes, finally topping out after a total of 4,216 lines and a record 29.4 million points.

Artiaga’s record does come with a small asterisk since he used a version of the game that was modified to avoid the crashes that stopped Blue Scuti’s historic run. Still, NES Tetris‘ first-ever level rollover is a monumental achievement and a testament to just how far competitive classic Tetris has come in a short time.

The glitch mountain

For decades, NES Tetris players considered it practically impossible to pass Level 29, a point where pieces start dropping so quickly that it’s nearly impossible to get them to the side of the well by simply holding down left or right on the controller. In the last few years, though, the development of hypertapping and then rolling grips has allowed pro-level NES Tetris players to get faster piece movement by tapping the directional inputs up to 30 times per second. With perfect execution of the rolling technique, it was at least theoretically possible to keep a game of NES Tetris going indefinitely, even at Level 29 speeds.

NES Tetris was never designed for play past Level 29, though, which means unintended glitches start to get in the way of any truly endless Tetris sessions. At Level 138, a memory overflow error causes the Tetris pieces to show up in some increasingly funky colors, including palettes that are incredibly hard to make out at Levels 146 and 148.