Not true. A few months ago, a kid played Tetris until it crashed. Technically beating the game.

Many great games are like this. Dwarf Fortress is my personal favorite, where losing is fun.

Weren't high score games a staple of arcades long before tetris?

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.

I was with them until the last sentence, like what a weird takeaway.

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.

You can finish the game by hitting a memory overflow bug very far in the game under specific conditions. Just look up finishing Tetris...

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.

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?

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.

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.

Welcome to every arcade game of the era

Basically any rogue like game.

Tetris 99. It's like racing side by side with 98 other Sisyphuses to see who can get their boulder up the hill most efficiently.

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.

I think that is basically life you try your best to not lose it all and you take the hits of joy no matter what. Sometimes it's a just one line but sometimes it's a whole tetris. Sometimes a misstep can cost you a delay in getting a new line, sometimes it can cost you the whole game.

I mean, what even is the point of winning a game? Ah yes, now I get to click through half an hour of dialogue and cutscenes, so that I can then not play the game anymore, because I've 'completed' it. Really, completing a game sounds like a scam invented by Big Game to sell more games. Like, oh yeah, we've made our game so fucking boring that players want it to be over with, so they can buy another of our boring ass games and play that to completion instead.

The original roguelike

False. I’ve won, you just need to be good enough to become a Tetris Master. Keep practicing! ;)

Tetris is like a drug.

I was very surprised by the history of Tetris.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt12758060

TIL i’m in my “back in my day” phase of life because it seems video game origins have gone from common knowledge to lore.