Tetris

Chronicle

2024: First run of the game to the end

On October 6, 2024, 16-year-old American Michael Artiaga was able to complete the Tetris game for the first time in history. It has reached what is known as "rebirth" - the moment when the game begins anew.

Tetris was developed by Soviet programmer Alexei Pazhitnov, and the first version of the game appeared in 1985. Artiaga, known under the pseudonym dogplayingtetris, used the NES modification of Tetris, which was released in 1989. At NES Tetris, it was thought for decades that it was virtually unrealistic to pass level 29, where figures begin to fall so quickly that they cannot be moved. In the future, special techniques were developed to solve this problem.

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However, the creators of NES Tetris believed that level 29 would be the last. Because of this, numerous errors appear in the later stages of the game. For example, at level 138, a memory overflow error results in elements appearing in strange colors, including palettes that are incredibly difficult to distinguish at levels 146 and 148. In addition, there are failures in scoring.

Artiaga, who is a two-time Classic Tetris World Championship champion, used a modified version of the NES Tetris, in which some bugs were fixed. However, certain problems still remained. So, at the 235th level, due to an error, it was not ten lines of blocks that had to be cleared, as usual, but 810 lines, which made passing a real endurance test. At the same time, a distorted color palette added difficulties - dark green blocks on a black background.

And yet Artiaga was able to reach the 255th level, after which the game was "reborn." It took the teenager 80 minutes to complete Tetris. The final result was 29.4 million points.^[1]

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