After 34 years of endless practice and age-long tournaments, Tetris was finally beaten in a record breaking play through by Blue Scuti. Now, while this isn’t as important as say a national disaster or politics, it’s very fun to learn about the gaming side of the world and let your mind relax.
Tetris was a game created in 1985 by Alexey Pajitnov in Moscow, Russia, and was released for the Nintendo NES in 1988. The game quickly became very popular afterward due to Nintendo’s already very popular gaming system for children and adults alike. People spent years afterward developing new ways to move the pieces faster and faster at increasingly difficult speeds. After many different techniques have been developed, rolling was the decidedly best strategy, where you roll your fingers on the bottom of the controller to push it into your top fingers, allowing gamers to cope with the quickly moving blocks.
Many national tournaments have been held for the world’s best Tetris players in an abundance of different places, and even popular players outside of tournaments have been playing and practicing endlessly, trying to get as far as possible. AIs were eventually created to play Tetris and see what happens at extremely high levels, and the AI ended up crashing the game. When this game breaking glitch first showed itself, the community went wild. Suddenly, there was a huge race of many, many, many different Tetris players trying to get as far as possible, wanting to be the first to beat it.
Back then, topping out was considered the kill screen, so tournaments were mainly a test of endurance. But a kill screen is actually a glitch in a game that prevents players from moving farther in the game, such as Packman’s complete distortion of the right side of level 256.
Getting a single on the 10th line of level 255 is one of those glitches. It has a hard time computing the score at that point, and so when it’s time to change the frame, the game is still struggling to calculate the score, which effectively overloads the game and crashes it. There’s a myriad of glitches like this, courtesy of old coding bugs because getting this far when the game first came out was a pipe dream. For example, on level 138 the game struggles to maintain the color loop with its usual math, resulting in pulling color pallets from unrelated areas of the game. This wouldn’t be a problem if it didn’t pull colors that created nearly pitch black pieces like the color pallets the community has named Dusk and Charcoal. HydrantDude made videos explaining these glitches in further detail on YouTube.
Clearing enough levels to even trigger the glitched colors is very difficult though, with a slightly faster speed being triggered at level 39 and persisting throughout the rest of the game. Plus, level 203 needs you to clear 200 lines instead of the usual 10 lines. Getting this far in the game is no easy feat, yet on December 21, 2023, a young Tetris player by the name of Blue Scuti managed to beat the game, though not without some difficulty. He missed the single on level 255, clearing a triple instead. He instead had to play to level 257, where the next opening was another single. It was stressful, but he eventually cleared that single and crashed NES Tetris on a live-stream, after streaming for two and a half hours. Fractal, another popular Tetris player, had become inspired by Blue Scuti’s play through and started his own stream, and also achieved a game crash after about two hours. He got it a little sooner than Blue Scuti, due to him being much more observant and counting the lines until the game crash on level 254.
