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Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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