Gamers have been stacking Tetris blocks since the ’80s, but only now has one teenager become the first known player to ever beat the retro game and achieve a reset to Level 0.
American teen Michael Artiaga, who livestreams under the screen name “dogplayingtetris,” broadcast his legendary achievement Sunday on Twitch.
Artiaga, 16, had been playing Tetris on his Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) for about an hour and 20 minutes before beating Level 255, the game’s highest. The level win triggered what Tetris fans call a “rebirth,” meaning the game looped back to the beginning.
At the rebirth, Artiaga jumped from his seat in celebration and repeatedly shouted, “Oh my God!”
“Am I dreaming, bro?” he asked his viewers.
“I’m so glad that game is over,” Artiaga said at the conclusion of his stream. “I never want to play this game again.”
By the time he finally hung up his controller and stretched his fingers, Artiaga had racked up a whopping 29.4 million points.
Artiaga’s Twitch stream has since been reuploaded to his YouTube channel and viewed more than 116,000 times. Throughout much of the stream, Artiaga is silent and displays intense focus. Like most serious Tetris gamers, Artiaga wore a glove on one hand as he played to reduce friction on his drumming hand, a common technique.
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Artiaga was reportedly playing a specific version of Tetris for NES that prevents the game from crashing after passing Level 155.
Already a pro, the teen became the world’s youngest Tetris world champion when he was 13. At 2020’s Classic Tetris World Championship final, he beat out his brother for the coveted title.
In January, the man who secured the Tetris distribution rights for Nintendo’s Game Boy system, Henk Rogers, told Global News the game was never designed to have an ending.
Regardless, Artiaga is not the only player to have ever “beaten” Tetris.
Rogers said it was “kind of a miracle” that 13-year-old Willis Gibson became the first known person to ever complete the game when he advanced so far (at Level 157) that the game essentially ran out of memory and froze, known as the “kill screen.” This was previously only accomplished by an AI program.
Gibson filmed the legendary round of Tetris, which lasted nearly 40 minutes.
The story of Rogers’ journey to bring Tetris to North America was recently dramatized in the 2023 movie, Tetris.
Two decades before Gibson and Artiaga were born, Rogers went to Moscow to secure the rights to Tetris for Nintendo’s Game Boy system. He successfully brought the game out from behind the Iron Curtain and became lifelong friends with its creator, Alexey Pajitnov.
The classic video game remains popular in its iterations today.
— With files from Global News’ Abigail Bimman
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