After 34 years, someone beat Tetris [video] | Hacker News Reader

After 34 years, someone beat Tetris [video]

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686 pointsgslin183 comments

The last couple of years in Tetris have been wild

I grew up with Tetris and playing a traditional DAS [1] style and never was able to put the time into learning hypertapping. Once rolling came out a few years ago I totally abandoned trying to keep up. My highest score was almost a maxout on 29

Something you'll notice too is that the younger players are crushing the traditional players by changing the rules. So, NOBODY at CTWC is playing DAS anymore and I think Jonas was the last big DAS player, before moving to Tapping. I attribute this to anyone over 30 learning in the DAS style while younger players can START with rolling.

RIP Jonas Neubauer (NubbinsGoody https://www.twitch.tv/nubbinsgoody) he was the guy that kind of lead the explosion of Tetris after the movie came out and Thor more or less retired. He and his wife were very helpful to me trying to get to maxout with some tips back in 2018 to get a CRT monitor as that was a limiting factor back then.

[1]https://tetris.fandom.com/wiki/DAS

I thought I knew Tetris. I guess I don't. I'm just humbled by how little I understood of the comment above.

What's cool is a lot of the above terms are specific to NES tetris too. Tetris has a lot of depth and there's a ton of variants out there depending on what you want to get out of playing. Personally I love the TGM series but it's totally different from what you'd think of if you started with NES tetris.

Quick glossary:

DAS - "Delayed autoshift," the delay is between when you press the button and when the long keypress starts to register as multiple clicks, auto-shifting the piece to the sides. So this is kind of a software-based "convention" that everyone knows, you open your word processor, you press the down arrow, it goes "down" one line and then waits for a quarter-second and then starts going in a more fluid motion steadily downwards as the software converts the continuous keypress to effectively be a stream of down-button-presses. Tetris has this too, if you hold down left/right you'll move once then after a delay it'll start shifting constantly to the edges.

tapping, hypertapping - tapping a NES controller very quickly by using pressure in your grip to create a "springy" system where you can rapidly flip up/down across the actuation point, so that you don't wait for the delay and the computer-auto-button-presses but communicate each button-press yourself

CTWC - Classic Tetris World Championship, hosted by the Portland Retro Gaming Expo.

Rolling - strategies where you flip tapping/hypertapping "upside down", so that the hand holding the button in tension is actually pressing on the D-pad while the hand actuating the button rapidly is pressing on the traditional bottom of the controller. I don't know what styles are popular but the controller itself might be held upside down to facilitate this. This is something like pressing on your mouse button with two or more fingers in an alternating rhythm in clicky-style games, normally the directional pad is too small to hit with multiple fingers but this technique allows multiple fingers to each register a separate keypress.

Maxout - I believe this refers to when the score overflows the digits available for display and the game just tells you that you have 999,999 points and you have to use independent means to confirm how much you actually scored

CRT monitor - hopefully I don't have to explain this to folks here but a big bulky sort of display that was used before LCDs became ubiquitous, short for "cathode ray tube," which is a big electron gun that we would eagerly point at our own faces hoping that the electrons all got 100% absorbed by little phosphors on the actual screen, which could be reliably triggered to emit red, green, or blue light.

Adding one more thing about CRT monitors for younger folks here... they had better refresh characteristics than early LCD monitors (which had lag due to their more complicated electronics/processing).

They still have better refresh characteristics than LCDs, on paper, although the practical difference becomes negligible.

CRTs have better refresh characteristics at the same refresh rate, which is relevant to NES Tetris because it runs at a fixed 60.1Hz (slightly faster than NTSC). But LCDs are available with higher refresh rate than CRTs, so if the software supports it you can get lower average latency on an LCD.

Do the display controllers for LCDs not wait for an entire frame to be written, so it can display it at once?

There are LCDs with a refresh rate more than double 60Hz, so even with entire frames worth of latency they could still be faster than a 60Hz CRT

The CRT's electron beam gets to "write" the video data onto the phosphor in real-time, as the analog signal comes off the wire.

But only once every 60 Hz (for a 60 Hz display). So, if you have an LCD display with higher latency but also higher refresh rate, you could on average be spending less time waiting for new information.

We're talking about the NES here, the physical output is analog, and locked to ~60.whatever fps

I’m not sure if the NES can, but by the 16-bit era the console can modify what’s being output between scan lines. Obviously that’s only beneficial if the action affects what is below the current scanline, but the way images were drawn allows for techniques that aren’t possible when the entire frame is buffered at a fixed refresh rate.

There is also a lot more to latency than just refresh rate. Retro RGB, My Life in Gaming, Digital Foundry and more have volumes on digital signal latency, and it is not as simple as getting a high refresh rate monitor or television. The TV itself can add latency. If going through a receiver, it can add latency. Need to scale a signal from 720p or 1080p to 4K? Maybe you’ll add latency, maybe you won’t. If the display doesn’t have a fast scaler, external devices can be used which will reduce the total latency, even though they may add some of their own (10-33ms).

But the framerate of a CRT is surely limited by the decay time required for the phosphor to stop glowing. I suppose this could be mitigated with a weaker beam for each higher framerate frame...but then you'd get a dimmer image.

Though after looking it up: seems hard to find, some quote as little as 1ms, but the general trend is towards 4-5ms, so 200fps in theory. Learn something new every day.

I suppose in that case, then it really just comes down to people having fond memories of lugging their CRTs to lans, but not wanting to re-enact it when we have great >=27" 144hz 4k monitors that are also like 10mm thick :p

I couldn't imagine how big and heavy a CRT with similar specs to modern displays would be!

Pretty big. I’m the OP and this is the CRT I have:

https://twitter.com/AndrewKemendo/status/1738948621238694167

At least 40lbs

Funny story, one of my best friends, former head of BD for confluent and former power lifter got this CRT for me and literally carried this massive thing down the street in downtown DC to deliver it to me. Ha!

It's possible to buffer whole frames, but there's no technical requirement to do so. Gaming LCDs update line by line.

>there's no technical requirement to do so

It lets you avoid tearing even if the sender starts acting weird.

I must be missing something because it doesn’t seem like ‘DAS’ needs such a technical name. Isn’t it just ‘pushing the D pad the direction you want the piece to go, then letting go when it gets there’?

DAS is probably shorter than anything most people could come up with to describe the style. Do you think your own description: 'pushing the D pad direction you want the piece to go, then letting go when it gets there' is a better way to communicate?

Almost any sufficiently advanced community will develop jargon that those outside it find confusing or lackluster.

It's not even a 'style' though, is it? It's just using the controls as designed.

Hyperclicking I get - it's pushing the button faster than the inbuilt repeat rate. DAS seems to just be.. what people must have been doing before hyper clicking got invented? Were people calling it DAS before hyper clicking became a thing? Or was it a retronym introduced to describe the disadvantages of that technique compared to hyper clicking?

The latter, and that happens all the time. I didn't hear ICE vehicle until EV was really on the scene.

Analog clock

Snail Mail

Well, considering Windows and MacOS have system settings to tune this (key repeat rate and key repeat delay), and considering the modern Tetris innovations are about how you can physically press a button faster, it doesn't seem that strange.

The selling point isn't being "technical". It's the 20x reduction in syllables.

DAS was basically a name people came up for to describe how keyboards repeat keys. Initial keystroke, a short delay, then repeated presses afterwards.

"Human subcultures are nested fractally. There's no bottom." (https://xkcd.com/1095)

What is hypertapping and tapping?

Wouldn't hurt to explain other voodoo words, e.g. DAS and rolling.

Both of those terms are explained quickly in the video, and have a dedicated explanation video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-BZ5-Q48lE

These are shown and explained in the video.

tapping/hypertapping: what you do to your mouse trying to get your click speed above 10 CPS

rolling: the same but tapping each finger on the bottom of the controller while pressing the buttons to feather tap the switch state extremely fast. like fiddling a mechanical keyboard key over the actuation point. The equivalent of putting sharpied electrical tape on your mouse and rubbing it.

DAS: the thing we did as kids to hold the piece up by holding down a horizontal direction.

Gently teasing :) - I definitely got _more_ confused, these are interesting examples.

> what you do to your mouse trying to get your click speed above 10 CPS.

> The equivalent of putting sharpied electrical tape on your mouse and rubbing it.

?!?

You know, like when you use bacon grease in your USB ports. Or flip the monitor to face away from you when you’re pressing backspace. Just the regular things normal technomancers learn to do to avoid the wrath of the Basilisk.

Kids these days don't realise the sheer dexterity that was needed to flip a CRT monitor to face away from you while pressing backspace.

I'll grant you that the modern way of having a dedicated "Shift" key on the keyboard is more convenient, especially if you need to type a lot of lower-case letters in a row. But we got by alright.

How is it surprising? Do you think people should just cheat with autoclickers instead?

You’re trying to give a specific kind of input to a controller (l, r, a, b etc….) at a speed higher than the controller was designed to input

So if you can vibrate the controller on a way that your input rate increases it doesn’t matter how you make it do that

This thread is a fantastic example of a failure for people inside a hobby to even begin to imagine how to explain it to someone outside the domain who expresses a casual interest in a nuance of the field. The poor person who asked for a definition of 'hypertapping' was given:

> tapping/hypertapping: what you do to your mouse trying to get your click speed above 10 CPS

Now imagine for a second that you have, as someone not engaged in the higher levels of professional competitive video gaming, never considered measuring click speed in 'CPS', nor considered how one might get it above 10. You would have no idea what you do to a mouse to accomplish such a thing, so you're none-the-wiser what 'tapping' or 'hyper tapping' actually are (or what the nuanced distinction between them might be).

Can you see how they might be confused?

Then they were told that 'rolling' is

> The equivalent of putting sharpied electrical tape on your mouse and rubbing it.

Again, not having ever considered sharpieing electrical tap, nor what effect it might have if one were to put it on a mouse and rub it (static buildup and a loud squeak possibly?) what is our poor non-elite-gamer to make of this explanation?

Now you're telling them that it doesn't matter how this input rate speed is accomplished. And yet it seems apparent that tapping, hyper tapping and rolling are all nuanced and distinct ways to accomplish this.

This is why people learn not to take an interest in other people's hobbies.

I really appreciate this! I enjoyed reading it for sure and totally agree!

In an effort to be accessible it’s often lands as hard to read cause so much is assumed.

You nailed the point though, so communication happened if maybe more circuitous than optimal

A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?

Genuinely

Didn’t everyone memorize Deleuze? (Joking)

People hold their fingers against the buttons of the NES controller. They then tap the back of the controller to push the buttons into their fingers.

If you have a touchpad, you can alternate between two fingers and effectively double your click speed. 12 clicks per second isn't too hard.

> you do to your mouse trying to get your click speed above 10 CPS

There are multiple ways to do this. Jitter clicking and butterfly clicking are the most common ways to do this which don't make use of a particular defect in some mice (double clicking).

This is where I learnt about hypertapping and rolling: https://youtu.be/n-BZ5-Q48lE

Though this is a different video of the same author as the original video in the OP

I didn't know he had died, it's really sad... I remember seeing some random Tetris videos on YouTube with him and the guy saying 'Boom Tetris'.

Speaking of Tetris, you can play it (single-player or multiplayer!) in your terminal via SSH:

  ssh playnetris.com

Code: https://code.rocket9labs.com/tslocum/netris

A minute or two into a game I got booted off;

Connection to playnetris.com closed by remote host.

Connection to playnetris.com closed.

>ssh playnetris.com

ssh: connect to host playnetris.com port 22: Connection refused

It's almost inhuman how good some people can get at rapid and highly complex muscle movements with enough practise. What an amazing achievement.

And mental, think about something like chess! In general it's just incredible how good we can become at anything. It's kind of interesting to think about in times long past where warfare was melee based and how there would have been similar outliers. Somebody who lucked into some good genetics, good diet, and good training would have been a mountain among men.

They must have been incredibly disappointed when they first encountered a well-disciplined line of mediocre pikemen!

Discipline, not training, for sure! The Spartans considered training (for war) to be demeaning.

https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...

Your reference does not seem to substantiate your claim. While interesting, it seems overly occupied with offering heavy moral judgement based on a modern perspective, to the point where it is exhausting and frankly annoying.

> It's kind of interesting to think about in times long past where warfare was melee based and how there would have been similar outliers. Somebody who lucked into some good genetics, good diet, and good training would have been a mountain among men.

The UFC exists today. Some fighters, like Jon Jones, are incredibly gifted and have won, and held, a championship title despite doing a lot of things "wrong" outside of the ring.

Part of the enjoyment of watching modern MMA is seeing chess matches and tactics play out between the most highly skilled fighters in the world.

> like Jon Jones, are incredibly gifted

with lots of steroids and other PEDs

Sure. Like many other athletes. I'm sure folks back in the day going into combat used every advantage they could as well.

I'm not sure if the parallel with the virtuosity of musical instruments was intended, but in any case one cannot disagree.

I think there's a reason most top Tetris players are kids. There's no way an adult could achieve the same level of hand-eye coordination, no matter how much they practice.

This is also why young players are generally better at first-person shooters, and why I'm unlikely to stay alive for more than a minute in CoD. ':)

And also why drafted soldiers are young enough to not even qualify for alcohols.

false

RSI

I beat Tetris back in 2020 (although by a different means): https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/i-finally-beat-tetris/

Man I would change your font, that is super difficult to read as large blocks of text.

I guess I'm just really good at reading text. It wasn't even a challenge for me.

Text looks normal to me. What's the issue?

The default font-family for that page is cursive, you see during the FOUC (before the webfont loads). Maybe the user has web fonts disabled?

Author here. I just changed the default font in the css from cursive to regular for those who have web fonts disabled.

Try it now ;-)

Don't pander to the haters!

PS love the by-line "WARNING: FULL FRONTAL NERDITY"

Indeed serif fonts are considered easier to read for big blocks of text. I would consider the font too thin as well.

Agreed, Overlock does not look very readable because of weird slanting.

I only ever knew the version of Tetris that shipped with the Windows Entertainment Pack <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Entertainment_Pack>.

Since this version was made for 16-bit Windows, it was no surprise that they used a 16-bit integer to store your score. What was surprising is that they used a signed 16-bit integer, meaning that after you passed 32,767 points, your score would roll over into the negative.

Teenage me was so good, I'd consider it a disappointment if my score didn't turn negative in every round I played.

I played Minesweeper almost every day during the summer in the 90's. I got so good at it that I eventually whittled down my time to a mere 17 seconds on the largest puzzle (expert). At that point I figured I couldn't get any faster, and moved on to a new game. Years later, I was looking at the Guiness Book of World Records and noticed that the record for the expert minesweeper is something like 25 seconds.

Of course, I'd have to dig up my old computer from a landfill to try and prove it, so I just have to live out the rest of my days knowing that I'm an unrecognized world record holder.

xyzzy !

Funny story. When my friend started playing minesweeper, I would go to his computer and clear out all of his scores by editing in my scores as "beating" him.

Being super competitive, in order not to lose to me, he became a fiend at minesweeper, being able to do solve the beginner series in under 20 seconds. As he would get better and better, I would continue to beat his high score until he had the beginner down to somewhere around 7 seconds.

I changed it to 6 seconds.

He beat it to 5 seconds.

I changed it to 4 seconds.

At that point he was like, WHAT IS GOING ON? And then I showed him how I could just edit the scores. Boy was he dissapointed. But it goes to show how far we can push ourselves if we know that it's "possible."

Related: My mom really likes the old Windows version of FreeCell. For years, every time she moved computers, I've had to copy the Windows registry values where the score table is kept in order to get her to "accept" the new computer.

Nice one! I bet lots of world records are casually beat like that - the overlap between “nerdy enough to get insanely good at, say, a puzzle video game” and “extroverted/arrogant enough to draw global attention to the accomplishment” seems pretty small.

The current record [1] is in fact 26.59 seconds for expert. This doesn't make you an unofficial world record holder because, among other reasons, the chance is that you have encountered an easy enough board by chance. The most popular measure of board difficulty is 3BV, defined as the minimum number of left clicks to solve that particular board, and should be at least 100 for the expert record to be recognized. This makes the current record extremely impressive---someone somehow clicked 4+ times second and correctly solved the whole table!

[1] https://minesweepergame.com/world-records.php

I recall that it was either old versions of Solitaire or Freecell that had the same issue. I remember intentionally losing games until my points were -32767ish, and it was the first time I experienced integer wraparound as a kid. That's the sort of thing that teaches you a lot unintentionally.

Anyway, I think that it's not really surprising that they'd use a signed integer in either case. In every codebase I've ever worked on, signed ints are the default merely because they're the obvious choice for a number. I only see uints when it actually matters, or when a developer is overly pedantic.

It's the Tetris version I still like the best. I still play it from time to time. In a dedicated Windows XP virtual machine, since 64-bit Windows doesn't play nice with 16-bit programs.

Indeed, I consider it a disappointment when I don't succeed to turn the score negative. When I'm in the right state of mind, and have enough time, and a bit of luck maybe, I can go from positive to negative to positive back to negative multiple times; I've never kept count, but I know of some instances where I've played a single game for over 45 minutes at least.

You can run windows 3.1 in dosbox if all you want is Tetris. There's display drivers for large screens (or 24bit color, but not both) available for dosbox as well. A full virtual machine seems a bit overkill when my entire small doswin games directory is <200mb (this includes all WEPs and a few dozen other small games for win 3.x and dos). For better compatibility with the (extremely rare) program that doesn't work under dosbox's dos emulation, you can go further and run an actual copy of DOS on a disk image.

It's overkill, but it works :)

I might give the dosbox + windows 3.1 option a try though, thanks for the suggestion.

See also:

Celebrating the first NES Tetris game crash (biggieblog.com)

197 points by davidrjones1977 10 days ago | 56 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38734106

What an inspiring video. I might go so far as to say it is this level of geekiness that moves our civilization forward.

Seems like a really supportive community as well. Compare this to „King of Kong“, which seemed much more competitive/ dodgy.

The video was extremely well made - such a joy to watch!

Amazing to see the progression lately, and GameScout is up there with Summoning Salt as one of the best gaming story tellers out there right now.

Here is another great introduction to the Tetris community by John Green from 2018:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twS0SrDg-fc

I’m not into Tetris but that was surprisingly interesting.

Yeah, same. I hardly ever even watch youtube videos, and skipped a bit at the start but then quickly got caught up in it...

Now the question is: can the RAM code execution lead to interesting game states/exploits like the Pokémon Yellow Total Control Hack? https://youtube.com/watch?v=p5T81yHkHtI

There's also one for Super Mario World: https://youtu.be/jnZ2NNYySuE

It can and we have achieved Arbitrary Code Execution in NES Tetris.

The setup is horrifyingly complicated and precise though, involving getting some near-impossible scores and entering specific names in the highscore list, then reaching the crash on the same frame that the internal values for random number generation happen to represent a jump instruction to said highscore list (and we get lucky and various registers also happen to contain values we need).

Then from there, there is some bootstrapping before total control is achieved.

Holy shit, and massive kudos!

However, I'm like 90% sure that this can be made easier using p3/p4 controllers through the famicom expansion port. In particular, Hydrantdude and I found a consistent enough setup using the single at 1489 lines (pushdown gives you a 50% chance, and I think).

This setup would even allow crude human-possible ACE. Right now we're limited to small payloads (I made a proof of concept that activates the unused two player mode), but more sophisticated setups might give us more power.

Size-optimized, RAM-only mods. Sounds interesting...

Watching this reminded me of The Wizard movie from the 1980s. Which at the time (I was 7) I had no idea what ASD was, now it resonates in a completely different way.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098663/

I get why this is exciting and all that, but how is bad code (or insufficient resources) leading to the bug or crash equivalent to "player beating the game"?

Because the game is code.

It's the last thing that can happen in the game, which I think is a fair definition of getting to the end, or "beating" it.

When I made a game crash through a bug before I did not consider myself beating the game, that is why I have or had difficulties understanding. I suppose the difference is making it crash through playing as many levels, for example, as possible.

I guess that's the difference between playing a game to the end, and exploiting a game to jump to the end or crash it. The former might be considered beating the game, the latter might not.

In order to get the "kill screen" on Tetris (or Pac-Man, etc) you need to play at an absolute master's level for an extended period of time

Also the Tetris player here (edit: arguably) isn't "exploiting" a bug. The game just literally hits a limitation that can only be hit via extended and nearly superhuman play

What if this "kill screen" were to happen at, say, level 30 due to bad code? Would it still be considered "beating the game"?

Yes, it would, and then you'd never hear about competitions in that game because it doesn't support ultra high-level play.

Well, it's definitely a judgement call.

I think most "serious" Tetris players can get to 30 easily in a short amount of time, right? Like 15-20 minutes? It'd be hard to think of that as a legitimate "ending."

Whereas a run to level 100+ or whatever for this kill screen is a major achievement. Took people 30+ years to get there.

I don't know, though. It's all subjective. If you want to think of a hypothetical lvl 30 crash as a "kill screen" or "ending" then hey... go for it.

Um, it wasn’t until 2011 before the first person achieved level 30, as the video mentions fairly early on

Thanks for the correction

What's interesting to me is the "kill screen" in Tetris is (apparently?) at a variable point in play.

So, this was the first person to encounter the "bug" (hardware limitation). But, future players may try to hit that point faster, with a lower/higher score, or other combinations of game state to beat the game in a "better" (more interesting) way.

If it was just happening randomly and fairly commonly, I doubt anyone would care. The reason people care here is because 1) it's a game people have been playing for so long without triggering this state before, 2) the condition was known (from an AI playing, and subsequent analysis) and people had been actively chasing it and were pushing the limits on the number of levels completed at the same time.

Pushing limits in games is fun.

I've never played competitively, but I remember well my own excitement as a child whenever I managed to trigger a glitch (such as getting enough bonus lives to overflow the lives counter on Commando on C64, which was pretty simple but still was very exciting the first time it happened).

Some games don't have deliberately implemented "you win" screens and gameplay can in theory go forever unless the game has a bug that prevents advancing.

In a game with no human-authored intentional "win state", one reasonable definition of "beating the game" is "reaching a state that no other player is able to surpass". If the game crashes at a certain point, then reaching that crash is a viable state that fits that definition.

We're on hackernews. Think instead of the player triumphing over the game as a hacker.

I think of it as "the first time anyone has not lost". Until that crash run, every game had ended with a top out.

Tetris is a deathmatch, and this is the first time Tetris died first.

It's an achieveable ending--one not planned by the coders, but one nonetheless. You cannot play past that point.

A couple of old arcade games have "kill screens", such as Pacman and Donkey Kong.

i reached the kill screen on Demon Attack on Atari as a kid. It was highlight of my early life

My understanding is that it's a bit of a roll of the dice exactly when the kill screen appears, so in theory you could continue playing longer. I suppose the significance, then, is that it's the first time that someone has played the game and not lost.

Because of the specifics of how this is done you actually can play past this point, but you have to intentionally dodge the crash and the conditions for the crash can be different per level.

It is technically possible to go up through level 255 at which point it loops back to 0. It's been done through a tool assisted run (carefully doing inputs frame by frame rather than playing in real time)

In this case, he even intentionally intentionally triggered the crash. As cool an achievement this is, I struggle to call it "beating" the game, since players could still theoretically go much further. Given that the glitch is predictable and well-documented, I'd consider it to be yet another (and new) obstacle to overcome, not the end. This is therefore the first time someone's ever hit the obstacle, and the first time someone's ever passed it (since he missed his first chance at glitching and had to take the second).

All that said, I feel a bit weird telling a community I don't belong to that they're incorrectly enjoying a game I don't play.

The game is man vs machine. The machine fills the space with blocks; the human clears space for the blocks. The machine wins when the human fails to make room for the next block. The human wins when the machine fails to deliver the next block.

this comment is fantastic and gives a clear answer to anyone griping about whether this is considered "beating" the game. scruti is the first human to beat the game, now other people will try to beat it in other ways on other levels.

Some old games are infinite, and don't have a proper end, then can roll infinitely. So as a result, you can play as long as you wish, until you reach the hardware limits, which is called the kill screen, and might be the closest thing to "finishing" a game when it's infinite.

I don't understand, what hardware limit?

Memory. Past a certain point, the numbers can become so high (score, level or other) that it corrupts the memory and freezes the game

The Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games can crash this way. If you cheat and enable perfect balance, then you can grind infinitely on a circular rail and eventually the score is so high it crashes the game.

That’s what I think makes the Tetris feat so incredible. There’s no cheating needed. This is being done on the base game after something like 40 years.

In this case, the hardware limit is CPU time. NES Tetris will give you more points for clearing lines the higher the level is. For example, on level 0 clearing one line gives you 40 points but on level 9 clearing one line gives you 400 points. This is implemented in the code by adding the base number of points to the score in a loop where the counter is the level number: https://github.com/CelestialAmber/TetrisNESDisasm/blob/2bd89... NES Tetris is written with the assumption that its main game code won't run for more than one frame. When the player reaches a high enough level the "add score for cleared lines" code will take too long, and the processor will get interrupted for the start of the next frame while it's still adding the score. This causes the game to crash.

Why do they use a loop - does the 6502 not have a multiply instruction?

My non-expert googling suggests that there is indeed no multiply instruction for the 6502.

https://www.masswerk.at/6502/6502_instruction_set.html

It's impossible to do anything else within the confines of the system, and it's difficult to get to that end state without skill and intention.

Reverse engineering the NES Tetris cartridge shows that it has only so many possible states which is what allows one to find these limits.

It’s technically arbitrary and something the community sort of collectively decided was a coveted goal. Personally, I think it’s a cool milestone. There will be more similar milestones probably but few will be on true unmodified code, which I think makes this one truly special.

I knew about hypertapping or rolling, but I wasn't plugged into the developments after that.

Exciting to finally get to the kill screen of this classic!

The game is beaten IMO when you beat level 255 and rollover back to 0 avoiding any position that would result in a crash before then.

The video points this out as a potential future goal, and it outlines what would be required to actually accomplish it.

The definition of "beating" the game is simply a convention.

Not going to happen without TAS.

At around level 247, you start to get game crashes without clearing any lines, just because the 'wrong' kind of piece appeared.

Now try to clear a bunch of lines with restrictions on what kind of pieces are allowed to randomly spawn.

Spreadsheet documenting these: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zAQIo_mnkk0c9e4-hpeD...

So for a certain class of games, I have found the secret to be — after having developed the muscle memory and the instinct — completely “zoning out” and playing solely by reflex. You simply can’t mentally process and intentionally respond in the timespan required to beat these games at higher levels, it has to be fully subconscious and automatic to win.

The only issue is that I haven’t figured out how to intentionally disconnect. It’s almost like falling asleep: you can be jarred back to reality and realize you were “zoned out” and can sometimes feel yourself on the edge of zoning back out, but the very act of “cognizantly deciding” to relinquish mental control is at fundamental odds with actually doing so. So you just have to “let it happen” so much as I can tell.

(My personal best high score in snake or some similar game on TI-82 or whatever came when I was playing covertly under the desk arm in math class in middle school while paying attention to the lesson with all my non-visual senses.)

Amazing sportsmanship, talent and determination! Kudos to this young man and this community, a true lesson of humanity.

I found this video weirdly moving. Thanks for posting OP.

Went through the Tetris rabbit hole.

Amazing how this game have influenced my generation and the next generation of people and games.

Beautiful

with what... a stack overflow error?

(pun... just in case anyone didn't get it)

I'm gonna have to ask you to go ahead and come back another time.

----

Edit - Also worth a look:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0409371

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12758060

I fell in love with Tetris back in the 90s, I’ve played it on a bunch of platforms (including a keyring). To learn VR game dev I’ve been working on a 3D version of Tetris:

https://youtu.be/o6RH_iVxlyc?si=Ha15IF1jPKkOsUwa

That looks great! Have you played BlockOut? It was a 3D Tetris for DOS. You might get some good ideas from it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo2b4--pI60

videogamedunkey has a pretty entertaining video that covers a bunch of various versions of Tetris through the years: https://youtu.be/EUJb1BD63ME?si=mRiq3p_f7Mh0VgX4

The best ever implementation of Tetris was Twintris on Amiga. The Soviet Union flag with bouncing hammer, then wonderful music and smooth animation, exploding sounds when clearing full rows - oh, my. Go and watch a bit of it on YouTube.

The speed of change in Tetris after invention of rolling is crazy.

Just like 4-5 years ago it felt like Joseph is GOAT and his records will hold for a while, and now he and the style that he perfected (hypertappjng) looks like relic of dinosaur era.

Alexander wept

i know a guy too

Unreal achievements being made in the game. I hope the "rebirth" screen can be reached!

I'm left wondering if the game score be overflowed to produce different kill screens?

Is this all only possible with old consoles?

I'm speculating that modern games limit the amount user IO on PC and Consoles?

Only Teris for NES matters.

Ironically the Tengen release was better.

Depends on what you mean by "limit user IO". Standard USB keyboards have a limit on the number of keys you can hold down at once but otherwise the limits are your physical speed rather than the protocol. Similarly, these techniques for fast clicking are still under what even the NES hardware is capable of; this rolling technique allows clicking buttons much more quickly than you normally can but they're still a long way from the 30Hz strobe the hardware itself will accept, as used by Tool Assisted Speedruns on real hardware. So even in the NES generation the "limits" were still far, far beyond human capabilities.

>this rolling technique allows clicking buttons much more quickly than you normally can but they're still a long way from the 30Hz strobe the hardware itself will accept

That actually kind of what I was thinking of :-) . I would have though more "modern" games , particularly multiplayer, would have software limits even as the hardware got more capable.

Quite the contrary, actually. Some games check for inputs every frame, and computers nowadays can run modern games at up to hundreds of frames per second.

The simulation rate is often lower than the draw rate though. Minecraft is as low as 20 updates per second, while something like Counter Strike 2 handles events immediately and sends precise timestamps to the server, not discretized to any sampling rate beyond your hardware.

Nobody artificially limits input rates because that would reduce responsiveness. You can analyze a series of inputs to detect humanly-impossible changes.

Online multiplayer games are more likely have proper timers for all the ability cooldowns if anything to allow game designers to finetune the balance between various abilities. Otherwise they would be very quickly exploited by autoclickers (software and hardware). Although stuff like "rapid fire"/turbo buttons for console controllers with "100% UNDETECTABLE" in the marketing materials are very much a thing, so there are probably plenty of exceptions.

As for single player games there are barely any reasons for game developers to have improved in this regard over the years. "OnKeyDown" is still a standard API in many input libraries and the simplest thing to do is to have this mistake. Unless it's an ability with multiple second cooldown where the mistake would be obvious. And that's not unique to small games made by beginners or indie devs, AAA games have the same problems. Just few years ago DOOM Eternal had an exploit where mapping jump to a scrollwheel (even better if you have freely spinning scrolwheel), in combination with a few other quirks allowed you to do game breaking jumps skipping large parts of levels by quickly doing a bunch of them in a row and accumulating speed before game noticed that you are above ground and shouldn't be able to jump again. It was somewhat hot topic between speed runners of that game.

How about the Brick Game? And that game might be the most played game ever all over the world.

>this rolling technique allows clicking buttons much more quickly than you normally can but they're still a long way from the 30Hz strobe the hardware itself will accept

This is actually false! Top players can actually roll faster than 30hz if they want; however, the game won't recognize this as all distinct inputs, so it really is the hardware that's limiting us. Check out this video to see how precise some players can be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K81CjNo4B_Q

(incidentally, i made a romhack of nes tetris that supports polling multiple times per frame, effectively removing this limit. i talk about it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9vKMNu5JWo)

I did not know about the scene but this video made me happy! Great to see such dedication!

Is there a definitive definition of "glitch"? To me, it's just a bug...

I think its a subset of bugs. A glitch usually is not fatal, allowing the program to continue in a possibly degraded/altered way. In games it most often refers to a bug that allows for some unintended behavior that may be advantageous for certain desired outcomes, although it also can be just a visual artifact or it could get you stuck. But I wouldn't expect it to be used to describe a bug that caused the game to shut down or end instantly.

This guy is like Neo from The Matrix

I was very saddened to hear that his father passed away not that long ago.

That has got to be very hard for a 13 year old.

Really? I was only today reading a Reddit comment from last week of who I assumed was his dad? https://www.reddit.com/r/Tetris/s/hDAjX39SGt

The comments seem to be from his mom.

Been “solved” via playing forever, https://harddrop.com/wiki/Playing_forever#:~:text=If%20you%2....

Wow, practicing for 3-4 hours per day! I feel like they’re gonna be regretful for spending that much time on this later in life. I spent way too much time playing battlefield 1942, had fun but way too much time wasted.

Time enjoyed is not time wasted.

You think most other kids are spending that time on something less regrettable? This is a serious accomplishment. Being able to commit to a goal, and putting in the work to achieve it is a useful skill. I believe it's transferable to some degree between disciplines. It might be called "grit". He's not just goofing off. In order to get to this level of performance, he'd have to have an organized training program, not just be goofing around with tetris. I see it as similar to getting good at bowling, golf, or tennis.

I'm not a sports person, or an organized-competition person for that matter, but I see a qualitative difference between "best bowler in school" and "setting world records for bowling."

I wouldn't say being the first is a waste of time, because I think virtually any effort at self-improvement has some value. But being among the best in the world, even in a smaller competitive environment, is extraordinary regardless of the intrinsic value of the activity.

It also reflects a certain tunnel vision which can be helpful or harmful later in life. But he'll be dining out on this story for a long time.

To quote Arcade Fire,

   If I could have it back
   All the time that we wasted
   I’d only waste it again
   If I could have it back
   You know I would love to waste it again
   Waste it again and again and again

if I had all the money I wasted on beer back, I could buy so much beer.

I love arcade fire

"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted. life" — Paul Morphy

Children can still enjoy doing stuff without it having to be useful for anything specific. Simple life, not too much worries.

But yeah gaming can also be a way of procastenating or even become an addiction. Then it's used as short-term feel good escape. And you can get caught up in it and yeah waste a lot of your time.

But you don't know what someone's incentives are for pursuing a certain action. Because the same action can be done for different reasons by different people. And it can be a waste of time in one situation and a great achievement in another situation.

Yeah I'm sure the incredible discipline needed to achieve this will have no other utility later on...

I practiced classical music 3-4 hours per day. Sometimes in the weekends, too. I played multiple instruments and sang in choir growing up. I enjoyed the work that gave me a sense of accomplishment.

Although I am not a professional musician, the time spent kept me out of trouble as a kid and a teenager. In addition, I learned to win and to lose gracefully, which publicly funded schools no longer teach.

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