Everybody talking about Scooty “beating” the game but nobody is talking about the story. There is a story. You are building a missile silo with bricks. The lines aren’t disappearing, the camera is scrolling up. It was the Cold War. It makes sense.
I have no official documentation of this.
No it was obviously a new gulag that you built around yourself! I do have documentation on this, but it’s mainly geometric symbols and scribblings about higher dimensions. My mom says it’s schizo, but she just doesn’t see the patterns!
A shitload of early games only method of defeating the player was simply to be come more difficult or faster until the player ran out of lives, especially during the early years of video games in the ‘70s and ‘80s. This is not a feature unique to Tetris at all.
The only real difference is Tetris’ longevity, which has far outlasted the Soviet Union it originated from.
False. I’ve won, you just need to be good enough to become a Tetris Master. Keep practicing! ;)
Grand Master even
A lot of people talking about the arcade component, but Tetris was the original shareware. It was a phenomena that spread through the USSR until it touched a British entrepreneur. It didn’t even keep score originally.
You can finish the game by hitting a memory overflow bug very far in the game under specific conditions. Just look up finishing Tetris…
In the NES version, yeah
Yeah people act like the grand master edition doesn’t have a following or a credits bonus level.
I am the man that arranges the blocks
That decend upon me from up. Above.
They come down and I spin them around
Till they fit in the ground like hand. In. Glove.
I am the man that arranged the blocks
That are made by the men. in. Kazakhstan.
they come two weeks late.
and they dont tesselate.
so much for the leaders five. year. plan.
My grandpa once told me a story
Of when he worked in the bycicle factory
And the delivery of bike chains didn’t come in
So for producing. enough. bikes.
They took the chains from the finished products
And brought the dismembered and the new bicycle. into. storage.
Another one on the list for the five year plan.
This is just inherent to the history of games stemming from arcades. If you “finished” the game you had to insert more coins again, basically every game was structured so that if you “won” you kept playing until you finally lost, setting a high score.
While that’s true in general, tetris wasn’t designed for arcades.
Maybe not the original Tetris, but there are many very popular arcade ports. Early versions of Tetris didnt even have line clears and the game just ended when the board filled.
i’ve never heard if a version of tetris without line clears. as far as i know it was in the original version distrubuted on floppy disks.
Yeah, quick Google search shows the original 1984 mono chromatic one had line clears and kept track of score. Homie is clearly making stuff up
And don’t forget grandpa pinball. Always gotta lose
Tetris is like a drug.
Unitonically, they actually use it to various degrees of success in a clinical setting.
Drugs are like tetris
Tetris drug like are
It does have an ending tho. And until recently, when a 13 year old kid managed to do it, the end of the game was only achieved by machines/AI. Tho, to be fair, the ending is basically just going so far that the game stops working.
Isn’t it a lot more like a capitalist treadmill? Work hard to make number go up! It is in fact beatable in the sense that the number can’t actually go up forever, eventually the system crashes.
This description of capitalism perfectly reflects soviet communism as well, tho
Truly, reaching singularity is the end goal
Tetris as a commentary on transhumanism.
the ending is basically just going so far that the game stops working.
Seems even more appropriate for a game from the Soviet Union.
you do realise that are hundreds of Tetris games where you can play endlessly?!?
Virtually endlessly. What they’re talking about is, AFAIK, the
actual original(not actually original, but NES) Tetris. It was meant to be infinite, but at some point the numbers get too big to store, and the programming starts breaking down. Some games might be able to keep going indefinitely, just resetting/looping some numbers, and in modern games it might take years, centuries, or even universal lifetimes to reach that point, but almost all “infinite” games will break down at some point.original Tetris was made on Electronika 60, very few people played that version.
That’s cool, I didn’t realize that - according to Wikipedia, it was “adapted to the IBM PC” and spread throughout Moscow and then to eastern Europe, so I wonder how many people actually played that. I guess the NES version was the first commercial one
they’re talking about the nintendo entertainment version of tetris, which is the most popular competitive version of tetris.
i wouldn’t call it the most popular.
it’s the one that they play at the largest tournaments, and the tetris game with the most sought after world records, so i’m using that as my indicator. what would you say is the most popular version for competative play?
Nes Tetris is practically unplayable for today’s gamers. While it draws massive nostalgia-driven tournaments targeting the US audience, games like TGM, TETR.IO, and PPT are far more popular globally.
yes, that’s why i specified competitive tetris.
When watching any big competition, it’s the one they use. While arcade variants like Grand Master have their own cult following, they are clearly in the minority.
Not true. A few months ago, a kid played Tetris until it crashed. Technically beating the game.
When you quit the game, you lose. When the game quits instead, you win.
In Russia the game quits you.
Summoning Salt has a great video about it, if you have 2 hours to kill.
I watched that video when it came out and it sent me down a rabbit hole of speed running and gaming retrospectives that was so deep I now can’t even sleep without my gaming videos. I don’t even play games and haven’t in many years but I’m so deep in the shit now even my daughter questions my watching habits wondering why I watch this stuff but don’t actually play.
Ah the ole summoning salt a roo. I feel like we’ve all been down a similar rabbit hole. I went down one with one of his many Mike Tysons punch out videos lol
I know more about Mario Kart 64 shortcuts now than at any time during when I was actually playing the game.
More recently, by avoid the crash states, “rebirth” has been achieved, which is where the level overflows and wraps all the way back to level 0.
So, true. The game is infinite unless you screw up and die
eta: timestamped link
No he glitched it on purpose. classic tetris game doesn’t stop. it goes forever until you lose.
however after certain level there is specific glitch that stops the game and it’s up to you can choose to not do it and play forever, or get multiple chances to delay it few more levels then do it to glitch and crash the game. That’s as close as you can get to “beating” the game
Fittingly, hacking the system to one’s advantage is part of the Russian mindset too.
Basically any rogue like game.
Weren’t high score games a staple of arcades long before tetris?
The whole reason to put ASS in the scoreboard, so yes.
I am ASS.
Yeah, that post tried maybe a little too hard to portray high score games as always losing. You win, if you get a better score than before or whatever score you’re happy with. Of course, this requires setting challenges for yourself on which to grow, so it could only ever have come from turbo-capitalist 'Merica …or something.
Many great games are like this. Dwarf Fortress is my personal favorite, where losing is fun.
I somehow became unable to lose, getting FPS death instead, and was forced to quit.
I am a failure.
Back in the day we disabled thermal calculation and used DFHack to clean up items.
Not sure how well the Steam version addresses this.
Project Zomboid goes “THIS IS HOW YOU DIED” Everytime I start a new game and well, it hasn’t been wrong yet.
Is the new build coop yet? I wanna work a farm with the homies.
Sadly it is not.
Kenshi also doesn’t really have a ‘win’ state.
Lots of other sandbox style games as well.
Can you ‘win’ Caves of Qud? Or just… not die lol?
Qud has an ending now, it came with the 1.0 update.
Ah! Did not know that, thanks!
I’ll have to give it another spin.
Finding new ways in which the environment (or your own actions) can kill you in Noita is very satisfying.
right up until redacted and suddenly it’s reeeaaaal difficult to find a way to end the game, because dying isn’t an option if you didn’t prepare for it XD
I found one of those genies that multiply in someone’s multiplayer room.
I farmed the Valkyrie for wishes until I was broken, but I still could not reliably cast my own wish spell. Turns out, it gets harder to cast the more you level it up. You would need some ridicilous stuff to counter that.
I’m always here for DF talk. Aquifer and active volcano remains a favourite
Oh man I used to hate aquifers. They’re more manageable in the latest version but I still don’t find myself enjoying it as a resource.
Volcanos are too much fun. I often unleash gratuitous amounts of fun playing with lava.
The original roguelike
Rogue came out in 1980, while Tetris came out 4 years later in 1984. Some nice bit of trivia there.
That’s a very old-school gaming style. Every game I played on my Atari 2600 was like that. You never win, you just play until you lose. I used to wonder about the possible mass side effects of this - were we subtly conditioning people to accept being losers?
And if a game did have an ending, you’d often just get “well done but the fight against crime is never over” screen and be dumped right back at the start of the game anyway.
I remember rolling the scoreboard in Space Invaders or Breakout past a million. It just starts over at zero - absolutely no congratulations whatsoever lol. Took me till like 5am to do it too.
the reason they were like this is that arcade machines were the progenitors of video games and the point was to keep people pumping quarters into them.
And if you were on the scoreboard you’d be pumping more than quarters!
I believe it teaches persistence, resilience, strength under fire, and humility. I love Atari.
Adventure and ET both had endings.
Does a landfill really count as an ending?
Hey - you can find them pretty cheap at Vintage Stock too!
I don’t get the reputation. It’s not the greatest thing to grace the Atari, but it’s not really bad. It’s not as bad as say, the Atari Pac-Man port. Just a kind of mid-tier game.
