Has anyone done that on level 19?  Or even at height 4? 

Probably.

I know there are multiple people who have "maxed" (i.e. nothing but Tetrises) on Level 19 Height 0.



EDIT:  youtube only shows a tool-assisted run, with the next best thing being Matt Bucco doing it at height 3.

Yeah, I watched the height 3 video.  I don't really think height 4 or 5 would be posssible without thor-like hypertapping.

Height 5 definitely requires hypertapping.

I guess Height 4 you might get lucky enough to clean up a few critical lines immediately based on center holes and then hypertapping wouldn't be required.

In Soviet Russia Tetris beats you.

The level name table ends after 29. The reason the counter glitches out is because it is reading in bytes beyond the end of the list. The gravity table also ends at 29. This speaks pretty strongly to their intentions that it should be a solid, game-ending event. Any extra lines picked up beyond that point are just that.

LOLerstakes!

I'm going with "best ending" - it seems to be the most reasonable requirement for puzzle games to be considered "beaten" - although I'd also throw in the best ending for the other game mode on height 5. Getting to level 29 is better, and 999,999 is even cleaner, but I'd consider those cases to be mastery or 100% completion: that's beyond simply "beating" the game I think. Although if I had to classify one for 100% completion it'd be getting to level 29. Capping scores is nice, but I consider an RPG 100% complete even if you don't max out your xp and gold.

Exactly.  The game IS intended to end at level 29, the proof is in the programming.  Any "levels" reached after 29 are unintentional and essentially require glitching the game (hyper-tapping) to get there.  The level numbers displayed post 29 are garbage data read from memory.

I am not convinced that this supports your argument.
Level 29 doesn't glitch, and it CAN be completed.  Simple as that.

I don't "beat" Legend of Zelda by just getting to Ganon.

Also, as Robin pointed out, the life-numbering glitch in SMB comes in at an extremely low 10 lives that they must have encountered during testing and accpeted due to other limitations.
I don't see this as any different.


(and, hypertapping isn't even required if you have some luck and a deep enough center well, nor is hypertapping "glitching" the game in any way)

Unless you can prove otherwise I absolutely do not believe this is possible.  You need hypertapping to even create a large well at level 19 speed.  Putting blocks at the left side tops out at around height 6 or 7 (maybe 8 at the most) at level 19 without hypertapping.

You only have to score 7 lines at level 29 to clear it, if you make the approach correctly (clearing the final line of level 28 with a tetris, getting 3 lines of 29 out of the way at level 28 speed).


Certainly not saying it's easy.  Just saying that it's possible.




Anyway, per the original topic of the thread, as has been said by myself and others, there is no "beating" Tetris.  It beats you.

I don't believe it would be possible to even set up that situation, even tool-assisted on an emulator using save states, rewinds, etc. Unless you use hyper-tapping to beat the DAS you can't make a well high enough to survive for that many lines.

Edit:  As far as beating Tetris, I guess the space ship ending is the closet thing to saying you beat it since that is the best possible ending that was created by the developers.  Other than that, everything becomes subjective.

The best b-type ending is harder than the flying saucer.

Yeah but I don't think there is any controversy about what constitutes winning at type B. I mean, you beat level 9 height 5 you get the best ending correct? And achieving that ending doesn't require you to die, you just win and it's over.

Well, that opened up the discussion of higher speeds than level 9.

level 18 high 5 is doable.
level 19 high 3 has been done...

It does glitch out if you TAS far enough into 29. There are a variety of game-ending bugs that you have to work around to do a full loop.

Obviously without an explicit ending, it sort of becomes a matter of semantics. There is no literal "win," but reaching Level 29 generally seems like the most logical endgame goalpost. 

I don't consider playing a level's worth of 29 the same as completing it. ("You survived a full ten lines of the Tetris Apocalypse! Congratulations! Your prize is a similarly swift death!") By Level 29 you have seen everything the game can throw at you -- there is no more advancement in the speed table, both in terms of what the player can observe and what is happening programmatically. The fact that the name table advances where the speed table does not just seems like they tied up one loose end but not the other. (FWIW, they did a simple hack in the SNES Tetris + Dr. Mario remake to just bound the bits of the level value so it cannot exceed 31.) For these reasons, finishing a full ten lines of it just seems more like an extra wizard goal to me.

Food for thought -- would your opinion be affected if:

1) If the game capped the counter at 29.
2) The game immediately looped from 29 to 00.

In Case #2, my opinion would change significantly, and certainly move the goalposts. I think we would need to start using loop notation -- finishing 29 would be a 1-ALL, and you would start back at 2-00. As it stands, I feel there isn't as logical a place to draw the line, and it's not humanly possible to loop the game either.

Anyway, it's not super important. I just feel that if you have to pick an endgame progress goal to shoot for so you can mark it off your list, Level 29 is what makes sense.
It's possible with just DAS, just incredibly hard. Ben and I are tied for "closest failure" with 29.7, I think. IIRC it's possible to stack up to the 10th row if you leverage tap extension (i.e., DAS into a hop tap to slightly exceed 10hz. Then, in ideal circumstances hopefully mash another tap to wall tech back into full DAS charge... but be prepared to have no momentum going into the next move.) Don't get me wrong, the constraints are tight. That said, it believe it is in the realm of possibility.


I've heard Thor has done 19-5.

Yeah, I guess I can see the argument that it's a "wizard goal" to actually clear Level 29.

But at the same time, the fact that it can, and has, been cleared before just raises the bar for what it means to be a true master of the game.

Since there is no "beating" Tetris, degree of mastery is the real benchmark.
And it's hard to say that a person who can reach 29 is at the same level as a person who has actually cleared 29 and then some.

That said, if the game actually capped the counter at 29 or looped back through "properly" my opinion would probably be different about what their programmers' intentions actually were.

(and yeah, I had heard about Thor clearing 19-5, as well, but 19-3 from Bucco appears to be the best video proof floating around right now other than TAS videos)

I could be wrong but wouldn't you need a stack of at least height 11 (on both sides) in order to survive until level 30?  if you are sitting at level 28.9 you need 11 more lines to hit 30, not 10.  I don't think it's possible to create that situation without beating DAS.

.


I believe an unrotated L with max DAS (no extra tap) can reach the left playfield wall in frame perfect fashion -- it locks immediately afterward. I'll have to test later to be sure. If not, the tap extension is an option. But yeah, you're going to be restricted to the bottom one or two rows of the playfield, and rotating is going to reduce your range significantly on account of the piece extending into the next row down. I'll try to definitively work out the max upstack you can manage before the transition to 29 later as well, but I think it's sufficient if all goes right.

The goal is right there in the name.
All you have to do is get a "tetris" which is 4 rows at once.
Then you have beaten the game!



At least that's what I tell myself.

There is NO beating tetris

you always die

everyone always dies

even when you max out, or reach level 30, you die

it is the best game ever

appears to have done a TAS that runs "to Level 329 and beyond", until the level counter wraps around back to zero. (No idea why the music is lower-pitched and slower in these videos -- maybe he changed over to PAL settings? -- but in earlier videos it's normal NTSC sound.)

To actually win at Tetris you must put the game down and never play it again. That is the hardest thing to achieve and the only move that can be considered a "win" for you personally

The only way to win is not to play... seems like that should be the tagline for a movie, or something