First Ever REBIRTH in NES Tetris
youtu.be
I still cannot believe it... first ever to get Rebirth! I'm so happy about finally getting this after all of the attempts. Thanks to everyone for the support...

First off, no that’s just his handle it’s not literally a dog playing Tetris.

Rebirth happens at about the 1:21 mark. It’s absolutely insane that the first killscreen happened less than a year ago and back then rebirth seemed like a pipe dream. Not just the endurance and skill, but knowing all the unique, unseen situations he needed to avoid in the higher levels in order to not trigger a killscreen. And some of those levels have a lot of conditions that will trigger one.

For those unaware of what this means: because of the way NES Tetris is programmed, eventually the levels will functionally loop back around to level zero again. Hence why the speed suddenly goes from hyper speed to beginner mode.

    • PKMKII [none/use name]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      7·
      3 months ago

      The overly simple explanation is, there’s too much for the processor to handle within the refresh rate window and because of that it ends up reading the current screen output information as instructions, which produces a bunch of errors and freezes up the program.

      • Assian_Candor [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        5·
        3 months ago

        So basically the default state when you go to high is the thing kills you but this nerd figured out a narrow set of conditions that he had to undergo to have it not kill him?

        Also I guess this is the last achievement right? Bc from this point you can just do this over and over?

        • PKMKII [none/use name]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
          6·
          3 months ago

          So basically the default state when you go to high is the thing kills you but this nerd figured out a narrow set of conditions that he had to undergo to have it not kill him?

          It’s not a default state, but yes he had to know all the conditions for each level and avoid them. Ironically, the killscreen is treated as the player “beating” the game as normally the game ends with the game overwhelming the player, but killscreen is the player overwhelming the game.

          Also I guess this is the last achievement right? Bc from this point you can just do this over and over?

          Yeah pretty much. Obviously there’s always potential in new high scores and fastest to rebirth, but this is the summit of technical achievement in the game.

    • PKMKII [none/use name]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      4·
      2 months ago

      TAS was used for some of the theory crafting and testing, but the human potential was always there as the game speed never gets any faster than it does at level 29. It’s just that combination of killscreen avoidance, skill, endurance, and RNG makes it extremely tricky.

      The real big advancement was the controller technique required to get past level 29, which was clearly intended to be the “you can’t get past this” level by the devs. That didn’t happen until 2011, and it wasn’t until 2021 that a technique was found that was reliable enough to get runs into killscreen/rebirth territory.