Michael "Dog" Artiaga, 16, is the first Tetris player to succeed in getting the NES version of the game to reset to level 0 after clearing level 255. The feat, streamed on his dogplayingtetris account on Twitch, took 82 minutes and left him astonished when he realized what he had done.
"Am I dreaming, bro?" he asked viewers, saying he was in "disbelief".
The teen carried on playing and eventually finished with 29.4 million points.
"I'm so glad that game is over," he added, as he prepared to wrap up his stream.
"I never want to play this game again".
The feat requires a version of the game with bugs corrected; normally it would crash before this point. Reaching that point was itself a recent achievement by another player, 13-year-old William Gibson, ejected from the game after reaching the level 157 kill screen.
Remarkably, until a few years ago, players believed it was only possible to play up to level 29. … In 2010, professional competitive gamer Thor Aackerlund managed to reach level 30 by using a technique called hypertapping, where a player vibrates their fingers in a way which moves the controller faster than the in-game speed.
Classic games often store the level number as a hexadecimal byte, hence 0xFF, 255, being the highest level and looping to 0 when incremented.