US teen becomes the first known player to complete Tetris

Image via Tetris Holding

US teen, Michael Artiaga, who streams online under the username “dogplayingtetris” has become the first known player to beat level 255 on Tetris to achieve a rebirth. The rebirth took Artiaga 82 minutes before he went on to amass 29.4 million points on the playthrough.

The whole thing was caught on stream and the streamer went on to say he would never play the game again. He was playing a patched version of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) game, which prevents a known crash from occurring at level 155.

Tetris was launched in 1985 by Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov. The title was first released on the Electronika 60 before making its way out of Soviet Russia and onto the IBM PC. Since then, it has been ported to some 65 platforms and set the world record for the most ported game.

By the late 1980s, more than a dozen companies believed they owned the rights to the game and a lengthy legal battle ensued before Nintendo launched the title on the North American version of the Gameboy handheld console.

However, in 2022, Pajitnov and Henk Rogers, who discovered and was one of the first to take the game to the US, formed a company called Tetris Holding and purchased all remaining rights to the game. Ever since then, the game’s original creator has retained a large portion of control over the game.

A series of the original rights battle and the fight to gain the rights to the game was made in 2023, featuring Taron Egerton as Henk Rogers and Nikita Efremov as Alexey Pajitnov. The series launched on Apple TV+ and became something of a success.

Today, there are more than 220 variants and versions of Tetris, found on most mobile devices, consoles, PCs, and even some TVs and other devices. Tetris Holding routinely contacts Google and Apple to take down unauthorized copies of the game.

An annual Classic Tetris World Championship has been held every year since 2010 with American Jonas Neubauer having won 7 of the championships and finished runner-up in two other finals. Michael Artiaga is the second most successful entrant, having won two events and lost in one final. The tournament uses the original version of the game, played on the NES and using Cathode-Ray Tube displays.

The NES version is widely considered the best variant of the original game, but high-ranking players have previously found that the game crashes when reaching level 155 or 157. A hacked version of the game avoids this crash and enables players to rack up higher scores.

Only a small handful of people even reached this stage of the game, previously, but teenager Michael Artiaga took it a step further by beating level 255. In doing so, he achieved “rebirth”, which effectively means the game starts again from level 0 allowing the player to continue accumulating scores. Eventually, Artiaga reached 29.4 million points. This is likely the highest score achieved in the game.

Guinness World Records states that the record on the original NES version is 8,952,432 which was achieved by Artiaga’s older brother, Andrew Artiaga in January 2024. Although this score has been beaten at least twice, both of these attempts used the hacked version of the game that enables players to bypass the known crash and allows higher point totals.

Tetris is available on Steam and Epic Games Store and can be directly downloaded on Windows. A musical beat-style version of the game, Tetris Effect: Connected can also be bought on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S while official versions of the game can be bought on Apple’s App Store and via Google Play.  

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