From Fortune:

A 13-year-old player has become the first to officially “beat” the original Nintendo version of Tetris by breaking it. Creating a “kill screen,” a point where the Tetris code glitches and crashes. Top players long considered unbeatable, the game doesn’t have a scripted ending, leaving players to reach higher and higher levels, and achieving a “kill screen” is a monumental feat.

Early on, players didn’t know how to reach higher levels, but eventually, techniques to progress were discovered. Using a technique called “hypertapping” took players to level 35, and more speedier approach called “rolling” helped one player reach Level 95. However, obstacles arose with the game’s color palette, bringing new difficulty to progress.

A Tetris-playing AI program, StackRabbit, made it all the way to Level 237 before crashing the game, showing that game-ending glitches could be triggered by specific events. This led to the mapping of scenarios that cause crashes in the original game using a compiled large spreadsheet that detailed the specific conditions most likely to lead to a crash.



Read more: 13-year-old gamer ‘blue scuti’ beats unbeatable video game ‘Tetris’ just shy of its 40th anniversary