"Oh my God, I'm so glad that game is over, bro. I never want to play this game again," Michael Artiaga said after making gaming history in an intense two-hour Tetris session. The 16-year-old is believed to be the first to have reached "rebirth" after beating the game's Level 255, causing it to flip back to Level 0, the BBC reports. The teen, who uses the screen name "dogplayingtetris," took around 80 minutes to get to Level 255 and kept playing for 40 minutes after rebirth, finishing with a total of 29.4 million points after clearing more than 4,000 lines.
The BBC reports that Artiega "celebrated and watched in shock" as the game went back to Level 0, asking, " Am I dreaming, bro?" When he was 13, he became the youngest-ever Tetris world champion after beating his older brother in the final. In December, a 13-year-old who goes by the handle "blue scuti" became the first to "break" the game by getting to the "kill screen," reaching Level 155, where a glitch could cause the game to crash at any moment. Gizmodo reports that Artiaga was able to get to Level 255 by using a Nintendo Entertainment System version of the game that was updated to avoid crashes.
It was once thought impossible to get beyond Level 29 because of the speed of the game's falling blocks, but records started falling after players used new techniques called "hypertapping" and "rolling." Ars Technica reports that to get to Level 255, Artiega had to overcome a massive glitch that causes the counter to clear after 810 lines instead of the usual 10—and "to make matters worse, the Level 235 glitched color palette is a dull green that is hard to see against the game's black background, making the level a true test of endurance." (More Tetris stories.)
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