I don't have the expertise to check the API, myself, but I've noticed a ton of innocent comments lately all having -1. Mbin shows the upvote and downvote counts separately, so I can see that entire threads are all receiving a single downvote, presumably from a single user. Seems like somebody's being a gremlin and just downvoting everything they see.
Some guy played to level 255 and it rolled back to level 0, (that's the rebirth). Then he played to level 91 after that. To answer an unasked but important question: he did it on a ROM and not a cartridge because it's pretty damn likely a cartridge would have crashed long before this point. Even on this particular ROM there are a bunch of ways to crash it (there's loads of them documented).
Did he use an original NES controller with the ROM or a modern controller? I know I have a hard time getting the 40 year old controllers to respond fast enough at higher levels, though I haven't tried the bump control method.
To add on: After a certain level is reached there are a multitude of tile combinations you have to avoid or they cause a hard crash. I believe oldschool tetris used to be played until the very first hard crash and that's where everyone thought the record would end. Prior to that was the development of rolling which allowed players to get past the original game over state that sped tiles up too fast to react to.
Now we have players so proficient they've memorised crash states, and are rolling over the game.
I wonder how long until Points + Prestige become an antiquated measuring system.
It's still wild to me people are continuing to break records in classic Tetris. You'd think they've reached the peak long ago, but they somehow continue to impress!