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A 13-year-old is the first human to beat Tetris | Numerous theoretical milestones remain
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this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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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
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.