For decades after its 1989 release, each of the hundreds of millions of standard NES Tetris games ended the same way: A block reaches the top of the screen and triggers a "game over" message. That 34-year streak was finally broken on December 21, 2023, when 13-year-old phenom BlueScuti became the first human to reach the game's "kill screen" after a 40-minute, 1,511-line performance, crashing the game by reaching its functional limits. //

The first known way past the brick wall of Level 29 was a technique that became known as hypertapping. By using a special grip that lets you vibrate a finger over the D-pad directions at least 10 times a second, you can effectively skip the "delayed autoshift" (DAS) that limits how fast pieces can move laterally when the D-pad is held down. //

In fact, a very careful player (or AI) might technically be able to avoid every possible crash opportunity and play all the way past level 255, where the game mercifully resets to Level 0. At that point, as YouTuber aGameScout recently noted, "both the player and the game emerge triumphant together" through a rebirth that will be "the ultimate final achievement of the original game."