A teenager has achieved a feat once thought impossible in the iconic video game Tetris.
Willis Gibson, 13, who goes by the name “Blue Scuti,” achieved a “true kill screen” on Tetris, where the blocks descend so quickly that the screen freezes.
While live-streaming, Gibson stunned himself and his audience by triggering the game-ending glitch on level 157 of Tetris on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).
As detailed in a YouTube video by aGameScout, the achievement is the culmination of a long-running push by the Tetris community and competitive gaming scene to complete the game. Not to mention three to four hours of daily training by the teen Tetris prodigy who pulled it off.
If you’ve never played Tetris, the aim is to assemble falling blocks to create lines. For every 10 lines you clear, you move up a level and the speed increases.
The fastest speed was level 29 when it became virtually impossible to use directional buttons to guide the blocks to the sides of the screen. Although that led many to declare it the kill screen, it wasn’t in the traditional sense of the word.
In retro gaming, a kill screen refers to the moment when you can’t progress any further in a game due to a glitch in its code.
More than two decades after its release in 1988, a vibrant competitive game scene flourished around NES Tetris. Pro players, tech buffs and hobbyists have tried to push the game to its limits by using new gaming techniques.
World records were repeatedly set thanks to novel “speedrunning” methods like “hypertapping,” a trick that sees players mashing a controller’s buttons faster than the game’s built-in speed. While another approach called “rolling” doubled the speeds at which players could tap buttons.
Between 2010 and 2023, Tetris players went from level 30 to an astounding level 148. In the meantime, an artificial intelligence software designed to play a modified version of the game managed to play Tetris until its coding and RAM went haywire.
By 2022, the Tetris community had their spreadsheets at the ready and were hard at work figuring out how a human player could do the same. The AI had shown that the crash didn’t always occur at the same spot, so the Tetris superfans decided to tally all the possibilities that could trigger it.
They discovered that the earliest possible time for the true kill screen was level 155, which wasn’t far off the world record. There was just one issue: at this stage of the game, things began to get erratic. Levels would morph into completely new colours, including shades of black that made it difficult to discern the falling blocks.
But, on December 21, Gibson managed to overcome these obstacles to accomplish the true game crash. More than 30 years after its release in the West, someone had finally attained the fabled prize of beating Tetris.
So, where does the Tetris community go from here? It transpires that there is still one lofty goal left to achieve. Next up, players are trying to reach the game’s “rebirth screen” at level 255 when it resets to the beginning. For many, this will be the ultimate achievement in the classic video game that continues to entice players.
