A milestone has been reached in NES Tetris. On December 23rd, the game was crashed naturally for the first time ever by a 13-year-old player known as Blue Scuti. He had reached level 157, and had cleared 1510 lines. The moment was captured on video. Scuti has trouble breathing when he realizes what he'd done.
Blue Scuti was one of the youngest players at the 2023 Classic Tetris World Championships, where the minimum age is 13. He took third place. He has quite a future in elite gaming ahead of him.
To understand this achievement, let's go back to NES Tetris when it was released in 1989. The score topped out at 999,999. Developers assumed no one would ever score that high, although the score was still kept internally after passing that mark in a strangely efficient fashion. The lookup table of levels stops at 29, because the developers saw that anything past that was "outside of human ability." The game still kept track of the levels internally. After level 155, the game starts to get really weird and veers toward a crash. But at launch, that level was never expected to be achieved. Little did they know what kind of gamers would be playing it 34 years later. Read an explanation of how Tetris works at those previously-thought unattainable levels and how significant Scuti's game is. -via Metafilter