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this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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How does one beat Tetris?
A lot of old games were intended to be played in an endless cycle--arcade games especially--but in practice there was always some kind of limit due to the hardware and coding practices at the time. Pac-man, for example, hits a level where half the screen is the normal maze and the other half is a random assortment of other sprites. Donkey Kong ends when Mario always dies at a certain level.
The NES Tetris limit hit here is a point where there are certain "random" chances of the game crashing depending on certain states. In his run, Blue Scuti actually missed getting the first possibility of hitting a crash and had to survive a few more levels to get the next one.
This isn't the full ending, though. TAS runs show that it is possible to get up to level 255 and then loop back to level 0. Getting there requires missing every single possibility of a crash, though, and the probabilities of that mount up as you go.
Full breakdown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuJ5UuknsHU
This person did it by playing it until it crashed. There are several points where particular actions will crash the game.
I would argue though that to beat Tetris you would need to beat level 255, at which point the level counter wraps to level 0
There was a 73% chance at the level it crashed that any single line clear would have caused it and the percentage only goes up from there. That is why there are theoretically more that could be accomplished since there is still a chance it won't crash but is very unlikely.
I reckon completing level 255 isn't going to happen for human players on the NES. They are pushing the input hardware beyond it's design to play the levels they're at now, and also crashes become more common at higher levels making a clean run to 255 even harder
Don't underestimate the gaming community. Once people get more comfortable with reaching higher levels someone will develope a strategy.
If you look into it, the only limiting factor are the colour pallets glitching out, after level 29 it does t become any faster, but at a certain point the palates were causing hard points as one level named charcoal was barely visible.
You somehow managed to write palette wrong twice in two different ways. I salute you.
I disagree. I think it's inevitable. They already have the final hundred levels mapped out, and there are long stretches that are completely safe. The challenge will be levels where you can't take singles and also the levels where you have to push down on every piece, but compared to what's already been accomplished, it's only a matter of time.
There’s also one weird level that takes 800 lines to clear as opposed to the usual 10.
The trick to getting that high regardless will be making sure not to hit the conditions required for the kill screen to occur, like getting a single line on level 155 which didn’t happen here, and somehow making it past all of the potential kill screens to reach 255. I’m not knowledgable in the ways of NES Tetris to know if this is possible but I’m surely interested in finding out. I’ve read various analyses that say it’s theoretically possible and theoretically impossible so it would be nice to see something definitive.
It has been done with a TAS, so it's at least theoretically possible. There aren't any technical barriers that would prevent a human from being able to do it; the drop speed no longer goes up after level 29, so no new techniques would be needed to hit buttons faster. Avoiding the kill screen conditions would be incredibly difficult, as would playing through glitched level colors.
All of which is incredibly difficult and will require even a top player to do hundreds of plays to get it to hit once. That's par for the course in these sorts of competitive games, and it should be possible. Question is how many years it will take.
Any idea how long such a run would take? This kill screen took around 40 minutes I think? I
’m not a Tetris community member but I’m interested in the whole ordeal as a gamer in general and programmer, and these sorts of things are interesting as an intersection of the two. I’ve also been playing Tetris since before it even came out on the NES or GameBoy and still play it in various instalments from time to time. I think I have to consider it to be the perfect video game in concept to this day, and seeing it get so much love after all these years is endearing to those of us who remember its beginnings.
You play it until it breaks
Seems like it would be a bug in the original game then. It can be fixed.
Many old arcade games have this, and they are called "kill screens". There is no programmed "end" to the game, you just keep playing until it runs out of memory, and then just goes all wonky. Some examples: https://gamerant.com/most-infamous-kill-screens-in-video-games/
Game rant went ahead and fully blocked access if you’re using an adblocker? Guess I don’t care enough about their articles to unblock, but still annoying.
I get the sentiment but just in case you wanted to know there is a small grey link at the bottom of that box that says Continue for now or something. It will allow you to read the article.
I noticed that a lot of websites use this particular plugin/service to detect adblockers and they all have this feature which is good for now.
Seemed to work for ublock origin on Firefox mobile.
But then it wouldn't be the original game anymore