Not true. A few months ago, a kid played Tetris until it crashed. Technically beating the game.
When you quit the game, you lose. When the game quits instead, you win.
In Russia the game quits you.
Summoning Salt has a great video about it, if you have 2 hours to kill.
I watched that video when it came out and it sent me down a rabbit hole of speed running and gaming retrospectives that was so deep I now can’t even sleep without my gaming videos. I don’t even play games and haven’t in many years but I’m so deep in the shit now even my daughter questions my watching habits wondering why I watch this stuff but don’t actually play.
Ah the ole summoning salt a roo. I feel like we’ve all been down a similar rabbit hole. I went down one with one of his many Mike Tysons punch out videos lol
I know more about Mario Kart 64 shortcuts now than at any time during when I was actually playing the game.
No he glitched it on purpose. classic tetris game doesn’t stop. it goes forever until you lose.
however after certain level there is specific glitch that stops the game and it’s up to you can choose to not do it and play forever, or get multiple chances to delay it few more levels then do it to glitch and crash the game. That’s as close as you can get to “beating” the game
Fittingly, hacking the system to one’s advantage is part of the Russian mindset too.
Many great games are like this. Dwarf Fortress is my personal favorite, where losing is fun.
Project Zomboid goes “THIS IS HOW YOU DIED” Everytime I start a new game and well, it hasn’t been wrong yet.
Is the new build coop yet? I wanna work a farm with the homies.
Sadly it is not.
Kenshi also doesn’t really have a ‘win’ state.
Lots of other sandbox style games as well.
Can you ‘win’ Caves of Qud? Or just… not die lol?
Qud has an ending now, it came with the 1.0 update.
Ah! Did not know that, thanks!
I’ll have to give it another spin.
Finding new ways in which the environment (or your own actions) can kill you in Noita is very satisfying.
I’m always here for DF talk. Aquifer and active volcano remains a favourite
Oh man I used to hate aquifers. They’re more manageable in the latest version but I still don’t find myself enjoying it as a resource.
Volcanos are too much fun. I often unleash gratuitous amounts of fun playing with lava.
Weren’t high score games a staple of arcades long before tetris?
The whole reason to put ASS in the scoreboard, so yes.
Yeah, that post tried maybe a little too hard to portray high score games as always losing. You win, if you get a better score than before or whatever score you’re happy with. Of course, this requires setting challenges for yourself on which to grow, so it could only ever have come from turbo-capitalist 'Merica …or something.
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.
I was with them until the last sentence, like what a weird takeaway.
Right? A lot of games have no win condition it was just to see how far you could get. Already saw some good examples on the comments, but pacman is another one. There is the kill screen but that’s just cause the game wasn’t made to go that long.
You can finish the game by hitting a memory overflow bug very far in the game under specific conditions. Just look up finishing Tetris…
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?
Adventure and ET both had endings.
Does a landfill really count as an ending?
Hey - you can find them pretty cheap at Vintage Stock too!
I don’t get the reputation. It’s not the greatest thing to grace the Atari, but it’s not really bad. It’s not as bad as say, the Atari Pac-Man port. Just a kind of mid-tier game.
And if a game did have an ending, you’d often just get “well done but the fight against crime is never over” screen and be dumped right back at the start of the game anyway.
I remember rolling the scoreboard in Space Invaders or Breakout past a million. It just starts over at zero - absolutely no congratulations whatsoever lol. Took me till like 5am to do it too.
I believe it teaches persistence, resilience, strength under fire, and humility. I love Atari.
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.
And don’t forget grandpa pinball. Always gotta lose
Welcome to every arcade game of the era
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.
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.
Basically any rogue like game.
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.
False. I’ve won, you just need to be good enough to become a Tetris Master. Keep practicing! ;)
