Tetris, the puzzle video game that requires players to complete lines by moving differently shaped pieces (tetrominoes), is one of the most iconic games of all times.
Built on simple rules, Tetris, created in 1985 by Alexey Pajitnov, a Soviet software engineer, established itself as one of the greatest video games ever made.
People of all generations play the game.
And in the gameplay that seemingly have no end, and that each level gets increasingly difficult as tetrominoes simply fall increasingly faster, it's only a matter of time before a block reaches the top of the screen and triggers a "game over" message.
But not for a teen from the U.S., who apparently managed to be the first person to ever reached the game's "kill screen."
Willis Gibson, the boy who is known online as "Blue Scuti," literally beats Tetris.
In the game of Tetris, the highest possible speed is achieved when a player reaches Level 29 on NES Tetris (after clearing between 230 to 290 lines, depending on the starting level).
At this point, simply holding down left or right on the NES D-pad can't usually get a piece all the way to the side of the well unless the board is extremely low. Because of this, most players who reached Level 29 usually find their sessions ending in just a few tetrominoes later.
Experienced gamers however, are able to utilize certain techniques of holding the D-pad, and one of the most famous, is the "hypertapping" technique.
By using a special grip, the players are able to vibrate a finger over the D-pad directions at least 10 times a second, allowing them to effectively skip the "delayed autoshift" that limits how fast pieces can move laterally when the D-pad is held down.
With hypertapping, players can effectively move pieces at Level 29 speed even when the board is stacked four or five levels high.
While that gives a little breathing room, even the most experienced hypertappers make mistakes, and a single misplaced tetrominoe can put them in extreme disadvantage.
The first Level 30 NES Tetris performance was achieved back in 2011, and it was only in 2020 that Joseph Saelee used his mastery of the hypertapping technique to get to Level 35.
Fellow player EricICX was the first that achieved the Level 38.
But it was Christopher "CheeZ" Martinez, who effectively invented a new technique, called the "rolling" technique, and hit Level 40.
Mastering this rolling technique allows gamers to get to higher levels with less efforts, than when using the hypertapping method.
Soon after this, it was realized that seasoned and experienced Tetris players were getting good enough to effectively play indefinitely on the same "Level 29" speed that had been considered an effective kill screen just a few years earlier.
Then, the inevitable happened.
Tetris was created by Pajitnov with the help of entrepreneur Henk Rogers, during the height of the Cold War, using a technology that was limited by the hardware of the time.
The game was initially developed on an Electronika 60 computer, which had limited processing power and memory, and that it's graphics were also limited by the hardware of the time, with the game’s pieces being composed of simple geometric shapes.
The game’s music was also limited by the hardware of the time, with the game featuring a simple, repetitive tune.
With new methods of holding and mashing the D-pad are invented, gamers are pushing the game to levels the original developers never imagined anyone could go, and because of this, players started noticing the game behaving unexpectedly.
The oddities begin at Level 138, where a byte-overflow error causes the game to start reading unintended areas of memory as color palette data.
Traditionally, the game of Tetris cycles through 10 easily distinguished patterns. Starting at Level 138, random color combinations began to appear, some of which made it much harder to distinguish the blocks from the game’s black background.
This glitch then become a huge problem at Level 146, where the pieces become so dim as to be almost invisible against the game's black background.
In 2022, it was EricICX who became the first to ever reached Level 146, and he couldn't pass that level because he couldn't see the color palettes anymore.
Blue Scuti then surpassed this, and managed to make it to a new record of Level 153, before he eventually reached Level 155, and confirmed that the game crashed at Level 157.
Blue Scuti literally ended Tetris after a 40-minute, 1,511-line performance, crashing the game by reaching its functional limits.
"It’s never been done by a human before," said Vince Clemente, the president of the Classic Tetris World Championship. "It’s basically something that everyone thought was impossible until a couple of years ago."
Blue Scuti said that he dedicated the incredible achievement to his father Adam Gibson, who passed away on December 14th of last year at the age of 39, which was a week before he managed to beat the "unbeatable" game.
It's worth noting though, despite the Tetris "kill screen" was reached, and that the competitive NES game has joined the ranks of games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong where programming choices imposed a limit on how far extended play can functionally go, but unlike those games where they always crashed at the same specific level, there is a variability that changes the level a Tetris game can end.
For BlueScuti, it was Level 157, and for an AI bot, it was past Level 255, before the game mercifully resets to Level 0.
However, it's worth noting that the AI managed to reach all the way to that height before crashing the game, because it ran on a modified version of Tetris, so its achievements aren’t strictly comparable to those of human players.
Regardless, the road to achieve a NES Tetris kill screen highlights the surprisingly robust competitive scene that still surrounds the classic game and just how much that competitive community has been able to collectively improve in a relatively short time.