When Finding Glitches Is Part Of The Game Experience
This week I have written a blog about Blue Scuti, the first ever person to beat the game Tetris.
Wait, isn't the game will run endlessly? What do you mean by 'beating' the game? And why it took nearly 34 years to have a person who can beat this? All of your questions can be answered here.
Here’s how: The way to beat this endless game is to trigger a 'kill-screen'.
This is a huge hugeee achievement, yes, but in this blog, I want to write about an even more interesting thing that players discovered along with this feat.
This is a famous Tetris game played by AI so that you can catch the glimpse of what's going on in this game
As you can see, after the level 29, it returns to 00, and then for the level 31, it's 0A, 32 is 14...
It's the first glitch that the player will encounter.
Why?
Because the developers didn't think that anyone will ever beat level 29, as at this level, the falling speed of the block becomes too fast that it's nearly impossible to pass it. It was only until 2011, 27 years after the game was launched, did a player - Thor Aackerlund manage to bypass level 29.
It's not the only glitch that the game has.
Officially, there are 10 colour schemes for every level in the game, and when a player pass every 10 levels, the cycle will repeat.
However, at level 138, new colour palettes suddenly appear, and it keeps changing through every level unpredictably.
I did think that it was an Easter egg from the developers, however, it's not. This surprise gift is merely an unintentional limitation in the game's coding, which you can watch here for a general view:
Basically, the developers didn't think that anyone can beat the level 29, let alone climb beyond 134. Hence, the game's code slowly shows its malfunction.
The complete colour table of Tetris
And the more you advance, the more eerie the game becomes.
At level 146, the blocks goes dark, hardly anything can be seen, then after this level, it goes back to normal...
Well, only for 1 level.
Then is the Charcoal level, the spookiest Tetris level of all...
Then, when the players manage to go through this level, everything turns back to normal, once again.
At around level 155, when the game has taken up too much memory that it becomes unstable, and players can cause the game to crash by clearing specific lines at once, for example, here is the document on how to crash the game by HydrantDude.
So, in order to trigger the crash, you must clean only 1 line at level 155 during the transition from level 155 to 156. The possibility is 100%.
Blue Scuti, during the livestream in which he made history, missed this opportunity, but luckily, at level 157, he managed to clear 1 line, and caused the game to crash, officially beat the game!
Finding glitches in games has always been part of the joy. For me, it's like hidden gems that make the game funnier and interesting.
Take Breath of The Wild as an example. Part of why I love this game is because there are numerous glitches to exploit. Speedrunning this game, and also in its sequel Tears of The Kingdom, is all about exploiting glitches. I find it super captivating, how the players able to master those glitches. You can watch speedrun here.
Glitches happen especially in those open-ended game, which theorically you can travel endlessly. However, when you go far enough, weird things will start to apepar.
In Minecraft, when you travel to as far as 12,5 millions blocks, a mysterious, gigantic wall will greet you. Again, this is unintentional, rather a render glitch that cause the game to malfunction. But it's so marvellous, isn't it? If you ask how long does it take to walk from the center to this place, the answer is roughly 9 months, according to Wikipedia.
I hope that you also feel enthusiastic about the game glitches as I do 😂
So, how about you? If you play games, have you ever encountered a glitch? Or, like me, you find a glitch on the internet and try to do it? If you don't, then have you ever discovered something unexpected that no one has ever told you before, maybe when you're travelling, working, studying,... Comment below!