Competitive Tetris has been around for decades, but the growth of professional gaming has accelerated dramatically in recent years. Just nine months after a 13-year-old became the first person to "beat" the game Tetris, Tetris champions are discovering more ways to reach the theoretical endpoint and achieving once-unthinkable milestones.

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Recently, a two-time Tetris world champion restarted the game from level 0 by completing level 255 of the NES version without machine assistance, becoming the first player to enter the second generation. This achievement significantly increases the theoretical limit of maximum scores.

Sixteen-year-old Michael "dogplayingtetris" Artiaga completed the feat in about an hour and 40 minutes, during which time he cleared 3,300 rows of blocks. After celebrating, he continued playing for another 40 minutes until the end of level 91, setting a new record of 29.4 million points.

Atiaga's achievement is more than just playing the game until it reaches an infinite loop. It represents years of research and innovation by Tetris enthusiasts.

From the release of the NES version in 1988 until 2011, people believed that level 29 was impossible to pass because the controller's D-pad was no longer powerful enough to move the blocks quickly. But the new button technology finally allowed players to pass the 100th level, which also exposed a loophole in the game code - the game after the 29th level was not considered from the beginning of the design.

After level 138, the game's color scheme sometimes has problems, making it difficult for players to see the blocks clearly, and after level 155, the game becomes very prone to crashing. With the help of artificial intelligence tools, Willis "BlueScuti" Gibson successfully fought the "kill screen" crash in January this year, becoming the first human to "beat" the game.

One thing to note about Artiaga's game is that he is using a patched "anti-crash" version. However, there's another obstacle hidden in NES Tetris's crashing codebase - levels are starting to get longer.

As any Tetris player knows, each level lasts 10 lines, so 255 levels shouldn't add up to 3300 lines. However, after level 219, the game can no longer accurately track the player's progress, and the discrepancy extends in subsequent levels. This bug and color glitch finally came to a head in level 235, where Artiaga spent about 20 minutes clearing more than 800 rows of nearly invisible blocks.

The high-score race may have entered a new phase, as professional players could theoretically play patched versions indefinitely. Still, some will continue to explore whether human players can escape the many potential crash points and achieve a "rebirth" on an unmodified version of the game, a so-called "post-255 loop."