Teenager reaches milestone in Tetris, taking the game to its highest level by achieving the mythical 'rebirth'.

Tetris is a title that is synonymous with an entire generation in the world of video games, and 2024 is certainly going to be a big year for its community of players. On this occasion, 16-year-old teenager Michael “dogplayingtetris” Artiaga has become one of the players who have made Tetris history. The player has reached a new milestone in Alexey Pajitnov’s game, becoming the first to pass level 255 and achieve the mythical “rebirth”, taking the game to its highest possible level and back to the beginning.

A new Tetris milestone has been reached

The milestone was reached during a stream in which Artiaga played in front of hundreds of Twitch viewers. The achievement, as reported by Ars Technica, came after 80 minutes and 3,300 missing lines in the game. At this point, the game managed to restart at the first level, proving that the game can become infinite. After a celebration and saving his game in the early levels, Artiaga managed to play for another 40 minutes, reaching a total of 4,216 lines.

“Oh my god, I’m so glad that game is over, bro,” Artiaga said on stream. “I never want to play this game again, bro... I was starting to lose my mind.”

As we mentioned at the beginning, 2024 has become a big year for Tetris, with a new generation of fans emerging and using new techniques to take the game to new levels. Just earlier this year, Willis “Blue Scuti” Gibson, a thirteen-year-old from Oklahoma, became the first person to “beat” the NES version of Tetris, achieving the unlikely feat of reaching level 157, known to fans as the “final kill screen”. One way of explaining what happened is that when a player reaches a level where the game crashes, there is a kill screen where the game stops completely and no more pieces appear. At one point, players had determined that the game could crash at level 155, but Gibson was able to get past that initial point and continue for a few more minutes.

It is worth noting that this milestone was also reached with a little help. The version used by Artiaga is a modified version that manages to avoid the problems of the original version of the game, thus avoiding the milestone reached by Willis “Blue Scuti” Gibson. Still, it is an unprecedented achievement, considering that the game was never designed to go beyond level 29.