2024-01-04 15:25:21
Because the original developers of Tetris never relied on players pushing the limits of the game so aggressively, bizarre phenomena began to appear at higher levels. (Photo: 123RF)
The video game Tetris, characterized by falling blocks, found its match in Willis Gibson, a 13-year-old American, who became the first player to officially “beat” the original version of the Nintendo game, by “breaking” it .
Technically, Willis, aka “blue scuti” in the gaming world, has reached what gamers call a “kill screen,” a point where the Tetris code goes haywire, causing the game to stop. .
This might not seem like a big win to anyone who thinks only high scores matter, but it’s a coveted feat in the gaming world, where records involve pushing hardware and software to their limits.
It’s also a very big deal for Tetris players, who many have long considered unbeatable. This is partly because the game does not have a scripted ending; These four-block shapes keep falling no matter how well you manage to stack them in disappearing rows. The best players continued to find ways to extend their winning streaks by staying in the game to reach higher and higher levels, but in the end, the game beat them all.
Until Willis succeeded on December 21 in triggering a destruction screen at level 157, which the video game world considers a victory over the game, something that goes in the direction of pushing the software beyond its own limits.
The creators of Tetris agree. “Congratulations to ‘blue scuti’ for achieving this extraordinary feat, one that defies all preconceived limits of this legendary game,” said Maya Rogers, president and CEO of Tetris, in a statement. Maya Rogers noted that Tetris would celebrate its 40th anniversary this year, and she called Willis’ victory a “monumental achievement.”
Years of observations
The road has been very long. At first, “people in the Tetris scene didn’t even know how to get to these higher levels,” said David Macdonald, a video game YouTuber who has been chronicling the video game industry for years.
“They were just stuck in levels 20 and 30 because they just didn’t know the techniques to go further,” he explained. Level 29 presented a particularly difficult obstacle, as blocks began to fall faster than the player could react.
Eventually, the players found ways to improve, as David Macdonald recounted in his detailed video of Willis’ victory. In 2011, level 30 was reached using a technique called “hypertapping”, in which a player could rhythmically vibrate their fingers to move the gamepad faster than the game’s built-in speed. This technique brought the players at level 35 in 2018, after which they hit a wall.
The next big milestone was reached in 2020, when a player combined a multi-finger technique originally used in arcade video games, with one finger placed at the bottom of the controller to push it against another finger located at the top of the controller. Called “rolling,” this much faster approach helped one player reach level 95 in 2022.
Then other obstacles appeared. Because the original developers of Tetris never relied on players pushing the limits of the game so aggressively, bizarre phenomena began to appear at higher levels. A particularly difficult problem arose with the game’s color palette, which traditionally displayed 10 easily distinguishable patterns. However, starting at level 138, random color combinations began to appear, some of which made it much harder to distinguish blocks against the game’s black background.
The contribution of artificial intelligence
It took a Tetris-playing artificial intelligence program called StackRabbit to break the deadlock by helping players spot where they might run into a rift leading to a destruction screen, and ultimately beat the game. .
StackRabbit, which managed to reach level 237 before causing the game to crash, was running on a modified version of Tetris. His achievements are therefore not strictly comparable to those of human players. Nor were his findings immediately applicable to the game played by man. But, his runs clearly demonstrated that end-game problems could be triggered by very specific events, such as which block pieces were in play or how many lines a player had cleared at once.
This put human players in charge of mapping out every possible scenario that could cause such shutdowns in the original game. This usually happened when decade-old game code lost its place and started reading its next instructions from the wrong place, usually resulting in unnecessary input. A massive effort spurred by StackRabbit’s experience ultimately led to the compilation of a large spreadsheet detailing which specific levels of play and conditions were most likely to lead to a shutdown.
This is what prompted Willis to take a chance on the record. Yet he himself appeared shocked when he beat the game at level 157. In his live video, he appears to hyperventilate before barely panting “Oh my God” repeatedly, clutching his temples and fearing faint. After putting his hands over his mouth in an apparent attempt to regulate his breathing, he finally exclaims, “I can’t feel my fingers.”
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