GoKawiilEarly in 2026 I was sweating. A few years before, I had made the statement that Antithesis had “beaten” Tetris. We have a tradition that we name conference rooms after games that we have beaten, and since 2021 there has been a room in the office named Tetris.
However, my statement of victory had been overtaken by events. As we shall see, teenage gamers had learned how to extend human performance into parts of the game our product had not reached. I made it my side quest to use my free time to catch up to the teenagers.
The goal was “rebirth” — running through all the levels of Tetris until the level counter rolled over from 255 back to 0. When this happens, the game returns to the speed and color scheme of level 0 and starts the climb through the levels again. If we could see all of Tetris, surely we could claim we had beaten it.
Unfortunately, our exploration was stuck on level 160. I was about to join a new department, and I knew once that happened I would not have time to work on Tetris, maybe ever again. Yet there I was, stuck.
But I am getting ahead of myself. I want to say up front that this does have a happy ending, despite a most exasperating resolution of the “stuck” situation. I should start the story at the beginning.
If you just want to see what we did in the end, and the weird glitches we found on the way, you can jump straight to Rebirth!
Back in the early days of Antithesis, new engineers would go through an initiation rite: learn our system by using it to play and hopefully beat a game from the iconic 1980s Nintendo Entertainment System. Over time we’ve tackled a lot of classics, including Mario, Zelda and Metroid. When I joined in 2019, I chose Arkanoid, because it was my second favorite NES game. My favorite game, Tetris, had already been tried.1
I had become semi-addicted to Tetris in the 90s when I was flying back from visiting a customer in Europe. The then-revolutionary in-flight entertainment system had a version you could play at your seat. I enjoyed using spatial reasoning to figure out how to rotate and position a piece mid-flight. Seeing completed rows vaporize as my score increased gave me an immediate sense of accomplishment.
Of course, Tetris doesn’t let you stay comfortable for long. Just when you get in the groove, the pieces drop faster. If you make a mistake, like covering up an empty spot with a new piece, you’re now playing defense and having to trade off future health for not crashing out right now. There is no such thing as a finish line: you simply keep playing until you lose. No one gets out clean. (Maybe this is all a metaphor for something.)
When we had tried before to beat Tetris we had made progress, but we had not managed to get very far in the game. But the idea of beating Tetris stuck with me, and became a (very) long-running side project. But what does “beating” even mean?
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