This TAS aims to reach the crash that happens in NES Tetris. To best experience it, you will have to patch an existing rom dump to increase the digits on the score display from 6 to 7, which can be found here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VYmem92eAhcOhl_sLAOkIuFlpeqANx2I. Make sure to select "7digitscore.ips" as that was the patch used. I also used game genie codes (KUYPZS and EXYPLI) to uncap the score past level 29, up to 49, after which the level display breaks once more. You can find a table to convert the level numbers to something human readable here: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/987042025624981534/1001200368086171709/Level_Conversion_Table.jpg
A sequel TAS is currently in the works.
feos: Claiming for judging.
feos: As others have mentioned in the thread, this run is far from optimal. It plays through levels 19-29 in 07:17.37 which is only 10 seconds faster than this AI that doesn't use Pause to manipulate a better piece. This run that appears to be a real TAS completes those levels in 2 minutes 46 seconds. This TAS demonstration from 2014 completes those levels in 02:53.98. The main problems seem to be that this submission doesn't do tetrises all the time (clearing 4 lines at once), and it doesn't play at the top to clear lines faster.
The goal is also strange. Tetris is a game that will show you an ending after you die, and this movie does get an ending after reaching the kill screen at the end, where the game pauses for a moment and then pieces start falling again and you can't do anything. But this movie uses a patch that does some tweaks to the score counter, and that decision is questionable.
We do accept ROM hacks if they are of decent quality and not overly obscure. The ROM patch used here is indeed obscure, because I could only find it in one place on google, and there was little to no explanation on what it actually changes. Here's a full list of bytes it's changing.
Why is this so important, one may ask? It's important, because that patch avoids the crash that happens on the original ROM with this exact submission, half way through (frame 126784). In a "fastest crash" category.
We have accepted "fastest crash" and "fastest softlock" categories to Playground, but it's not an acceptable goal for Standard (because it's not a standard goal in its nature) or Moons (because it doesn't entertain the audience all that much) movie classes. So Playground would be an appropriate place for this goal if the submission was better optimized. But not when the game is tweaked to contradict the very goal of the movie. If you aim for the fastest crash, you shouldn't patch the game to make it happen later.
This post mentions that FCEUX is just not good enough to emulate this kind of crashes accurately, but this run desyncs on BizHawk early on. I haven't tried running it on Mesen, which is also very accurate, but for a potential future attempt BizHawk is a must, ideally its NESHawk core.
adelikat asked which goal could be more suitable for this game, but it's hard to discuss the potential if the original game has to be hacked to continue working after a certain point. And if we don't patch it, the only goal I can see as technically interesting is playing until the difficulty resets. But that would still not be Moons content, and if we're limited with Playground, we can have quite some variety of arbitrary goals, as long as they are worthwhile in their nature and as long as they are actually met.
Rejecting this attempt though. Better luck next time!