First off, no that’s just his handle it’s not literally a dog playing Tetris.
Rebirth happens at about the 1:21 mark. It’s absolutely insane that the first killscreen happened less than a year ago and back then rebirth seemed like a pipe dream. Not just the endurance and skill, but knowing all the unique, unseen situations he needed to avoid in the higher levels in order to not trigger a killscreen. And some of those levels have a lot of conditions that will trigger one.
For those unaware of what this means: because of the way NES Tetris is programmed, eventually the levels will functionally loop back around to level zero again. Hence why the speed suddenly goes from hyper speed to beginner mode.
I don't follow the Tetris community too close. Is Rebirth a previously theoretical achievement or like a TAS specific thing or similar?
TAS was used for some of the theory crafting and testing, but the human potential was always there as the game speed never gets any faster than it does at level 29. It’s just that combination of killscreen avoidance, skill, endurance, and RNG makes it extremely tricky.
The real big advancement was the controller technique required to get past level 29, which was clearly intended to be the “you can’t get past this” level by the devs. That didn’t happen until 2011, and it wasn’t until 2021 that a technique was found that was reliable enough to get runs into killscreen/rebirth territory.
Aye that's cool thanks for the explainer. I'm pretty much just a casual g@mer but I really dig shit like this.