Over the weekend, 16-year-old American competitive gamer Michael Artiaga became the first human NES Tetris player to achieve “rebirth” by beating level 255 and rolling the counter back to zero.
Artiaga streamed his record-setting, two-hour run on Twitch, and the feat concluded with a second pass at Level 91 after he’d cleared a total 4,216 lines for 29.4 million points, Ars Technica reports. Afterward, Artiaga remarked: “Oh my god, I’m so glad that game is over, bro. I never want to play this game again.”
The achievement only took about 35 years; classic Tetris debuted on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1989, and the game was long considered unbeatable as play hits mind-melting speeds in the upper levels, pushing the limits of human performance. Yet, the development of new techniques, rolling and hyper tapping, cleared the way for new milestones.
Known as “dogplayingtetris” or simply “dog,” Artiaga also became the youngest winner of the Classic Tetris World Championships in 2020. He’s one of two teens to land in the spotlight over the past year for eviscerating earlier classic Tetris records.
In December 2023, a 13-year-old streamer known as Blue Scuti effectively beat the game by reaching its kill screen, crashing the software after clearing 1,511 lines. Artiaga was able to avoid the kill screen by using a version of the game that was updated to mitigate crashes. The live-streamed saga still featured several nail-biters, including a counter bug at level 235 and a color-palette glitch that made the rapidly falling blocks even harder to see.
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