From Jason Koebler at 404 Media:
A 13-year-old competitive Tetris player has become the first known human to beat the game on the original NES by forcing it into a kill screen. In doing so, the player, Blue Scuti, broke world records for overall score, level achieved, and total numbers of lines in the 34-year-old game. Previously, only an AI had broken Tetris.
Tetris was released in 1989; it is currently the year 2024.
What’s fascinating is what it means to “beat” the game. You have to play long enough without losing that the game implodes on itself and crashes. This is not winning the game; you’re actually beating the game by playing so well that the code of the game itself is unable to keep up and crashes on you.
Per Ars Technica:
Those milestones were somewhat devastating because the “final” barrier of NES Tetris was only a few more levels further. In 2021, programmer Greg Cannon used a program called StackRabbit to play perfect Tetris through 237 levels, at which point he discovered the game unexpectedly crashed. As HydrantDude explains, though, that same crash can sometimes happen as early as Level 155, due to the vagaries of the game’s score-counting algorithm and the inefficient way it calculates new scores during the brief “vblank” period between individual game frames.
Ars does an excellent job writing up the full history of competitive NES Tetris play, and how some very smart people pushed this old game to its limits. For fun, and simply because they could.