Tetris

Except for Willis.
- By now the new way to play it is to reach higher and higher levels while not triggering any crashes.

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.

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.
- More recently, by avoid the crash states, "rebirth" has been achieved, which is where the level overflows and wraps all the way back to level 0.
  So, true. The game is infinite unless you screw up and die
  eta: timestamped link
- 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.

You can finish the game by hitting a memory overflow bug very far in the game under specific conditions. Just look up finishing Tetris...
- In the NES version, yeah
  
  Yeah people act like the grand master edition doesn't have a following or a credits bonus level.

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.
- No it was obviously a new gulag that you built around yourself! I do have documentation on this, but it's mainly geometric symbols and scribblings about higher dimensions. My mom says it's schizo, but she just doesn't see the patterns!

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.
- Isn't it a lot more like a capitalist treadmill? Work hard to make number go up! It is in fact beatable in the sense that the number can't actually go up forever, eventually the system crashes.
  
  This description of capitalism perfectly reflects soviet communism as well, tho
- Truly, reaching singularity is the end goal
  
  Tetris as a commentary on transhumanism.
- the ending is basically just going so far that the game stops working.
  Seems even more appropriate for a game from the Soviet Union.
- you do realise that are hundreds of Tetris games where you can play endlessly?!?
  
  Virtually endlessly. What they're talking about is, AFAIK, the ~~actual original~~ (not actually original, but NES) Tetris. It was meant to be infinite, but at some point the numbers get too big to store, and the programming starts breaking down. Some games might be able to keep going indefinitely, just resetting/looping some numbers, and in modern games it might take years, centuries, or even universal lifetimes to reach that point, but almost all "infinite" games will break down at some point.

Weren't high score games a staple of arcades long before tetris?
- The whole reason to put ASS in the scoreboard, so yes.
  
  I am ASS.
- 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 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.

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.
- 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.
- I somehow became unable to lose, getting FPS death instead, and was forced to quit.
  I am a failure.
  
  Back in the day we disabled thermal calculation and used DFHack to clean up items.
  Not sure how well the Steam version addresses this.
- Finding new ways in which the environment (or your own actions) can kill you in Noita is very satisfying.
  
  right up until redacted and suddenly it's reeeaaaal difficult to find a way to end the game, because dying isn't an option if you didn't prepare for it XD
- 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.

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.
- I am the man that arranged the blocks
  That are made by the men. in. Kazakhstan.
  they come two weeks late.
  and they dont tesselate.
  so much for the leaders five. year. plan.
  
  My grandpa once told me a story
  Of when he worked in the bycicle factory
  And the delivery of bike chains didn't come in
  So for producing. enough. bikes.
  They took the chains from the finished products
  And brought the dismembered and the new bicycle. into. storage.
  Another one on the list for the five year plan.

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.
- While that's true in general, tetris wasn't designed for arcades.
  
  Maybe not the original Tetris, but there are many very popular arcade ports. Early versions of Tetris didnt even have line clears and the game just ended when the board filled.
- And don't forget grandpa pinball. Always gotta lose

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

Basically any rogue like game.

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.
  
  But it was actually made in the Soviet Union. Don't trust me though, I'm terrible with history.

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?
- Preparation for real life, I guess. There's no win condition that I know of :)
  
  I think you win if you have a satisfying life, career, kids or whatever you personally want to get out of it, and don't have to be poor when you're old. I'm not rich or famous but I feel like I won at life.
- the reason they were like this is that arcade machines were the progenitors of video games and the point was to keep people pumping quarters into them.
  
  And if you were on the scoreboard you'd be pumping more than quarters!
- 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.
- Adventure and ET both had endings.
  
  Does a landfill really count as an ending?

TIL Tetris is from USSR. Aswell as that the pieces in it are called tetrominos.
- Did you never play with sound?
  
  Response: What do mean? It plays the Tetris theme.
- This was cool as well: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt12758060/
- Check out Gaming Historian's excellent video on the creation of Tetris! https://youtu.be/_fQtxKmgJC8

Tetris is like a drug.
- Drugs are like tetris
  
  Tetris drug like are
- Unitonically, they actually use it to various degrees of success in a clinical setting.

But you get really good at packing stuff so the skill translates to real life.
- Whenever I'm packing the car for a trip, I hum the Tetris theme...

Welcome to every arcade game of the era

The original roguelike
- Rogue came out in 1980, while Tetris came out 4 years later in 1984. Some nice bit of trivia there.

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.
- God that game was such a letdown. I heard "Multiplayer tetris" and thought I could play with friends.
  Nope.
  
  There are plenty if multiplayer Tetris games out there. Tetris 99 was going for something very different.

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.
- Life is the same. What is the point in "winning life", just so I can be burried with some medals, and remembered for a few years, before being forgotten, while everything I did is undone.
- Different people like different things, believe it or not.
  
  Well, I was hoping my comment would be ridiculous enough to make it clear that it's in jest, but apparently not. 🫠
  I mean, I do strongly prefer a gameplay loop you can (want to) play forever over story-driven games, but I am very much aware that this is a personal preference.

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.

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.

I was very surprised by the history of Tetris.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt12758060
- I had always believed that Tetris was open sourced and freely licensed. Never knew a dude owns it

This guy obviously never played B mode on the Game Boy. My space ship was best space ship.

https://youtu.be/hWTFG3J1CP8
- I've had this song stuck in my head on and off for at least a decade.
  
  Every time I have to move stuff around in the fridge to get something bulky to fit, I am the man who arranges the blocks.

And space invaders... Fight until you die.

Lib boomer meme.
You know the russophobia/anticommunism/fashism is bad on Lemmy when literally nobody mentions it in 80+ comments and this nonsense is upvoted 700 times.
The power of the bogeyman is strong here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_religion
- I love when someone unironically uses that particularly dumb -phobia term because I immediately know to disregard everything else they've said.
  Looking at your post history I continue to be correct.
- Yeah, russophobia is when out of 80+ comments no one mentions that author may have implied some bad connotations for Soviet Union. To decrease the amount of anticommunism under this fascist post, everyone repeat after me:
  Through days dark and stormy, where great Lenin led us... and I forgot the lyrics.

- 2048 has a finite board and an "ending". 131072 is the biggest block you can get (assuming you're playing a version that occasionally spawns a 4 instead of 2), after that you can still fill up the board with descending pieces but you won't have enough space to upgrade them all.