A thirteen-year-old has become the first human to play Tetris NES (NTSC) to its killscreen, an accomplishment that came 34 years after the game was launched in 1989. Willis, AKA Blue Scuti, was also the first person to reach Level 157, culminating in the “biggest achievement in the 34-year history of the pro classic Tetris scene,” according to the classic Tetris scene YouTube channel aGameScout (video embedded below).
Tetris was released on the NES 8-bit console back in 1989, and today, there is a thriving dedicated scene for fans and competitive players of the game to enjoy.
When playing Tetris NES, players will reach the fastest game speed at Level 29. Getting to this level is quite an achievement, but from here on, the Tetris blocks fall so fast that it is beyond traditional gameplay input methods to reach higher levels.
At Level 29 and beyond, holding down left or right on the controller will not consistently manage to get a piece to touch the side of the play area. Players at this level come face-to-face with the Delayed Auto Shift (DAS) built into block-dropping games like Tetris. Thus, Level 29 was regarded as the killscreen for decades as it was impossible to manipulate the falling pieces fast enough to clear them.
Hypertapping and Rolling
In 2011, a gamer called Thor Aakerlund reached Level 30 by vibrating his fingers to bypass DAS – a 'Hypertapping' technique that would become common. Aakerlund’s Level 30 record stood for seven years.
Thanks to the wider adoption of Hypertapping, Level 31 was reached in 2018 by a gamer called Joseph Saelee, who subsequently went on to beat his own record multiple times, level by level, reaching Level 35 in 2020. aGameScout notes that deep runs into the 30s still required a degree of luck with the falling blocks.
A big upgrade to the Tetris NES player’s arsenal came in 2020 when a player called Cheez introduced the Rolling technique to competitive Tetris gaming. Vibrating the underside of the controller made it possible to button mash around twice as fast as the fastest Hypertapper. This meant gamers had much more control over their Tetris gaming destiny, making sustained runs beyond 29 much more frequent. Cheez debuted in the Hall of Fame using his Rolling skills as the first to hit Level 40 in 2021.
Rolling was widely adopted by the community, so previous Tetris champs managed to reach even higher levels using the technique. Stalwart Tetris player EricICX reached Level 95 in 2022, thanks to Rolling.
Color conundrum
The next hurdle to greater Tetris heights was precipitated by an 8-bit era programming quirk. After Level 138, the color palettes used by the blocks are known to glitch and deliver random color choices that are difficult to see.
Typically, the difficult-to-see blocks are not easy to distinguish from the background. These visual roadblocks made climbing to higher levels slow down in the 2020s, but PixelAndy still achieved Level 148 in Nov 2023. And this was the record before Blue Scuti’s achievement.
Reaching the killscreen
In 2021, developer Greg Cannon programmed a Tetris playing bot to check out the levels of Tetris that were out of reach of humankind. His StackRabbit program could reach Level 237 before Tetris crashed – in other words, it hit a killscreen. Had it reached Level 255, the game would have reset to Level 0 style action.
In brief, the killscreen happens in extended game sessions when the Tetris NES code is tripped up by a byte-overflow error, resulting in a crash. The level where this crash occurs doesn’t seem to be set in stone, it depends on how the prior action unfolds. Gamers theorized that the first level that could see a kill screen would, in practice, be Level 155.
When would the first human be able to hit the Tetris NES killscreen? It turns out that 13-year-old Blue Scuti just managed it on December 21, 2023, when he reached Level 157. He had to survive a little longer than Level 155 to trigger the killscreen but secured a human player achievement in both the level count and touching upon this final destination.
Yesterday, Blue Scuti shared his full 40-minute Tetris NES play session in the video embedded above.
