5 Mind-Blowing Ways People Mastered Famous Video Games

5 Invisible Tetris

Everyone knows Tetris. You stack falling blocks into vanishing rows until they either reach the top or you get bored and make a wang. There is no end.

However, in the confusingly named Tetris The Grand Master 3: Terror-Instinct (we're pretty sure they got the title from a Steven Seagal movie), there's a mode that has an actual, definitive endpoint ... assuming you're good enough to reach it, which, unless your name is Jin8, you probably aren't.

It starts off like any game of Tetris, except the blocks fall much quicker. We count about two blocks per second, and Jin8 is handling it like a champ. He's sticking those suckers together like a blue methed-up mason.

Then at the three-minute mark the game decides that two blocks per second is for babies and men who see the world as anything but an intricate series of right angles. The fall animation disappears completely and the blocks come down instantaneously, giving Jin8 less than a quarter of a second to place a block before the next one's up. Somehow he keeps this up for two minutes, and then it happens: Invisible. Fucking. Tetris.

That animation doesn't do Jin8 justice. Nothing short of watching the entire video set to a Viking rock opera written to commemorate his deeds does it justice. He's stacking invisible, instantly falling blocks while the credits scroll by at a snail's pace to distract him -- because it wasn't hard enough before.

If you watch the video, you'll notice that he clears several sets of lines, meaning he has the placement of his unseeable insta-blocks memorized. When it finally ends, he's rewarded with a lame fireworks animation and the most underwhelming message since the days when putting "CONGRATURATION!!!" on the screen was considered closure.

4 Falling Off of Games to Win Them

F-Zero X is a racing game where futuristic cars blast through sharp turns, pipes, jumps, and loops at ridiculous speeds. Obviously, there's a constant risk of plummeting to your fiery death, because (even in the idyllic world of the future) people only watch racing for the crashes. Of course, with three-dimensional tracks come three-dimensional shortcuts. BZ4Eoo7 (that's somebody's gamertag, not the result of a cat having a seizure on our keyboard) makes like every other unskilled newbie in a high-stakes racing game -- he flies straight into corners at full speed, like he's still pumped from watching 2 Fast 2 Furious. But whereas your buddy just plows into a wall and explodes in a ball of idiot shrapnel, BZ4Eoo7 maneuvers so precisely that he leaps out of a half-pipe and lands, unscathed, two miles away. Presumably now wearing a pair of sunglasses that materialized from nowhere.

Then came F-Zero GX, a sequel with more complex tracks and more elaborate shortcuts. Desperate for the fastest time, CrazyGameNerd (finally, an honest pseudonym on the Internet) came up with the novel solution of driving his car to its literal breaking point, then purposely smashing into the wall to send his smoldering wreck flying ...

... allowing him to skip a large chunk of the track. Hey, dead or alive, first place is first place.

But nothing beats Marco A.G.J., who exploits so many tricks that he barely touches the track. He starts the race by instantly falling off the course, and he never returns. What follows is two straight minutes of precision aerial maneuvers and pseudo-teleportation. Remember, this started off as a car racing game:

We guess at some point Marco decided that he was done with F-Zero and would rather play a glitchy psychedelic rail shooter, then turned out his pockets and discovered he didn't have the money to buy one.

Halo 3's multiplayer has been the cause of more deaths than most actual wars. Millions of players have spent hundreds of millions of hours shooting each other in the face. So long, in fact, that some eventually began to question how worthwhile that pursuit was: Surely there's more to life than hovering pretend armored balls over a defeated opponent's corpse? Disillusioned with the casual slaughter, they decided they'd rather turn Halo's sprawling multiplayer maps into the sort of playgrounds they could only dream of when they were children.

That bit of gravity-defying acrobatics is known as trick jumping. By finding the itsy-bitsy invisible walls and corners that hold the game world together, exploiting cracks in the physics system, and practicing for hundreds of hours that could have been spent learning another language, players are able to sprint up sheer walls like the sky owes them money. And that's just scratching the surface. You think pulling off a headshot in Halo is hard? Try jumping off of a piece of debris in midair:

Or launching a traffic cone up into the sky with you and jumping off it, then forcing it to follow you with a carefully timed grenade explosion and jumping off it again:

Or jumping backward off a ledge, shooting an icicle off the bottom of said ledge, jumping off of that icicle, shooting down another while in midair, and then leaping off of that to reach a platform that's normally totally inaccessible. Jesus, we're not even making sentences anymore.

Turns out the final boss in Halo 3 was the English language, and it was defeated by trying to describe what this player just pulled off.

2 Playing Two-Player Games Solo

Everyone knew that one kid who was so good at Street Fighter that your first move might as well have been putting the controller down and crying. Now imagine you are that kid. You don't have anyone to play against because they've all unfairly declared you to be cheap and run off to play on the trampoline instead. Your only option is to play with yourself. No, not like that -- you plug in two arcade sticks and use them both. We're talking about children here, deviant.

Street Fighter III superfan Desk is as good at the game as is he bad at picking pseudonyms. In this video, he's actually inputting commands for both characters at the same time, pulling off moves with one hand we couldn't do with two.

Apparently, playing a game meant for two people by yourself isn't as rare as you'd think. Below is a video of a dude playing the shoot 'em up Ikaruga in co-op mode. It's sometimes referred to as a "bullet hell" game. Two guesses as to why.

And remember that Tetris game from earlier? Here's a guy taking on a co-op variant. Sadly, he doesn't reach the invisible stage, because that would break the code of the simulation running our universe and we'd all have to reboot.

Here's a guy playing Beatmania against himself. Beatmania is kind of like playing the piano, if your piano hated you and was actively trying to give you a seizure.

Dang -- we haven't seen hands move so quickly to accomplish so little since the first time we got to second base.

Oh, don't act surprised. You knew we were only accusing you of sexual deviance to take the heat off ourselves.

1 Freestyle Dance Dance Revolution

Dance Dance Revolution is a game where the emotion and passion of dancing is replaced by authoritarian arrows and stiff, rigid movements dictated by an unfeeling machine.

It's like Guitar Hero for your feet, except that sometimes DDR can also be played with dance moves that are usually reserved for saving the local community center. Welcome to freestyle DDR, where people stop listening to the machine and start listening to the beat.

We already nailed the tagline for you, Hollywood.

In freestyle DDR tournaments, gamers must complete an in-game song while creating a separate dance routine above and beyond mere gameplay. Points are awarded for creativity and flair, so, like you see above, dancers will swap places, leap off of the game board, and occasionally, almost accidentally, teach an uptight rich girl to love again. And they do it all without looking at the screen, because they've long ago memorized the timing and steps to a video game dance, using the part of the brain normally reserved for remembering the birthdays of loved ones.

Things get even crazier when people highlander their partner to absorb their dance potential, giving them access to two dance mats, which they play on at the same time:

At least that kid gets gasps of awe and hopefully some confusing make-out time in the Cruis'n USA cabinet. Meanwhile, this poor kid in Thailand nails his own sick routine and is rewarded with nothing but scattered applause and a collective stare of judgment.

Damn ... tough crowd. Seriously, if we saw someone play two games of DDR at once while flipping upside down, our high-fives would probably shatter his arm, no matter how lame this sentence sounds now that we think about it.

Karl Smallwood is a freelance writer. You can contact him or see what else he's written by checking out his Twitter. Or see what he looks like by checking out his Facebook. Ryan Menezes is a writer and layout editor here at Cracked. Follow him on Twitter.

Related Reading: Speaking of video games, did you know the best ones are hand-crafted for addictiveness? For acts of gaming dickishness that bordered on art, click here and behold the story of Fansy the Bard. But gaming can have non-virtual consequences too. Just ask these people who saved lives thanks to playing video games.