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Dogplayingtetris blasts past 3,300-line rollover in two-hour, 29M-point endurance test.
Michael "dopgplaying" Artiaga reacts with disbelief shortly after rolling the Tetris level counter past 255 and back to 0. Credit: Youtube
Months ago, 13-year-old Willis "Blue Scuti" Gibson became the first person to "beat" NES Tetris, crashing the game after a 1,511-line, 57-level performance. Over the weekend, 16-year-old Michael "dopgplayingtetris" Artiaga became the first to reach an even more impressive plateau in the game, looping past Level 255 and instantly rolling the game all the way back to the ultra-slow Level 0.
It took Artiaga a bit over 80 minutes and a full 3,300 cleared lines to finally achieve the game's first near-mythical "rebirth" live in front of hundreds of Twitch viewers. And after a bit of celebration and recovery on the low levels, Artiaga managed to keep his rolled-over game going for another 40 minutes, finally topping out after a total of 4,216 lines and a record 29.4 million points.
Artiaga's record-setting game starts a few minutes in, while the "rebirth" rollover happens at 1:21:24.
Artiaga's record does come with a small asterisk since he used a version of the game that was modified to avoid the crashes that stopped Blue Scuti's historic run. Still, NES Tetris' first-ever level rollover is a monumental achievement and a testament to just how far competitive classic Tetris has come in a short time.
The glitch mountain
For decades, NES Tetris players considered it practically impossible to pass Level 29, a point where pieces start dropping so quickly that it's nearly impossible to get them to the side of the well by simply holding down left or right on the controller. In the last few years, though, the development of hypertapping and then rolling grips has allowed pro-level NES Tetris players to get faster piece movement by tapping the directional inputs up to 20 times per second. With perfect execution of the rolling technique, it was at least theoretically possible to keep a game of NES Tetris going indefinitely, even at Level 29 speeds.
NES Tetris was never designed for play past Level 29, though, which means unintended glitches start to get in the way of any truly endless Tetris sessions. At Level 138, a memory overflow error causes the Tetris pieces to show up in some increasingly funky colors, including palettes that are incredibly hard to make out at Levels 146 and 148.
A tool-assisted speedrun from May proves that the rebirth rollover is possible on an unmodified copy of NES Tetris.
Then, starting at Level 155, an inefficiency in the game's score-calculation algorithm means every single line clear has at least some chance of crashing the game. While it's theoretically possible to dodge those crash-inducing situations with careful play, it's functionally impossible for a human to keep track of all the complex variables and probabilities that determine whether a crash can happen past that point in the game. Using a modified, crash-resistant version of the game, as Artiaga did, seems likely to be the only way for a human to achieve a rebirth rollover without the kind of tool assistance seen here.
Even with a modified game, though, Artiaga faced another massive mountain of a glitch before he could achieve rebirth: Level 235. While the Tetris Level counter usually cycles every 10 lines, vagaries of the game's binary-coded decimal line counter cause the level count to get stuck on 235 for a whopping 810 lines. To make matters worse, the Level 235 glitched color palette is a dull green that is hard to see against the game's black background, making the level a true test of endurance.
Artiaga stares down the pale-green blocks of Level 235's 810-line gauntlet.
Artiaga stares down the pale-green blocks of Level 235's 810-line gauntlet. Credit: Youtube
Artiaga, who became the second person to ever reach Level 235 back in May, also became the first person to clear Level 235 during his rebirth run after spending 20 grueling minutes of near-perfect play staring at those dim, puke-green pieces. "Oh my god, I've seen the light," Artiaga exclaimed after passing through the Level 235 gauntlet. "The amount of everything... whenever you're on Level 235 for 800 gosh darn [lines], I can not put into words how draining that is, in every single facet of the game," he added after the level counter had finally rolled over.
“I never want to play this game again, bro”
Artiaga—who started playing high-level Tetris competitively at the age of 10 in 2019—has won the Classic Tetris World Championship two times, in addition to setting multiple records in the game and dominating many smaller tournaments. Despite all that, he said during his stream that "this is the best thing I've ever done in Tetris, bro."
The moment when the game's level counter finally rolled over led to some significant hyperventilating and repeated screams of "Oh my god!" from Artiaga, who jumped out of his seat and put his hands to his head at the enormity of the moment. "There's no way, there's actually no way," he said in disbelief at one point. "It's actually over."
Artiaga briefly collapses on his bed shortly after the rebirth rollover.
Artiaga briefly collapses on his bed shortly after the rebirth rollover. Credit: Youtube
As the game continued to run at extremely slow, lower-level speeds, Artiaga took some time to briefly collapse on his bed and rehydrate (while occasionally nudging falling blocks to beneficial positions). He also took time to scan his Twitch chat and thank the waves of subscriptions and donations that came flooding in after his achievement. Artiaga even broke out his phone for some performative social media scrolling during the "too slow" Level 7.
By the time the game reached Level 19 speed once again, though, Artiaga was back to focus mode, rolling his way to about 20 more minutes of top-level play. By the time his roughly two-hour performance ended—with Level 91 on screen but 347 levels in the rearview mirror— Artiaga was absolutely spent.
"Oh my god, I'm so glad that game is over, bro," Artiaga said on stream. "I never want to play this game again, bro... I was starting to lose my mind."
Now that the Tetris rebirth has been proven humanly possible (with crash-avoidance mods, at least), the community will no doubt move on to see who, if anyone, can complete a double rebirth in a single uninterrupted Tetris session. The prospect of continual rebirth even opens up the possibility of the kind of multi-day marathon play that has characterized some other classic arcade games. One thing's for sure: The classic Tetris scene has certainly come a long way since the days of the Level 29 "kill screen."
Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.
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