Name: After 34 Years, Someone Finally Beat Tetris
Uploaded: 2024-01-09T08:00:13.000Z
Duration: 16 min 47 s
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This is Willis, aka “Blue Scuti” setting a new world record for the longest game  

of NES Tetris by getting the first ever level 157. But something unexpected is about to happen. 

Adverbs of degree

“Oh…oh…oh…oh my god” He just became the first person ever to trigger  

a game crash, reaching the “True” Killscreen which is by far the biggest milestone in the 34  

year old history of the pro classic tetris scene. So why is this such a big deal, and can a  

record like this ever be broken? To answer both those questions,  

we need to go back and start with the  first “unbeatable” barrier in the game. 

In NES Tetris, released for the  Nintendo Entertainment System in 1989, 

the goal is to assemble falling  blocks to clear complete lines. 

For every 10 lines cleared, you move up a level and the speed gets a little bit faster. 

The fastest speed is reached at level  29, and at this point the pieces can  

no longer reliably get to the sides by  holding down the side to side buttons. 

For decades, this was considered the end of the  game, and level 29 got dubbed the “killscreen”  

because it always killed your run. Except, it wasn't a killscreen  

in the traditional sense. In retro games, a killscreen  

normally refers to when it's impossible to get  any further due to a glitch in the game's code. 

For example, in Pac-Man, the killscreen is reached  at level 256, where a glitch garbles the entire  

right side of the screen and you aren't able  to eat enough white dots to clear the level. 

NES Tetris doesn't actually  have a glitch at level 29. 

The level is clearable if you can somehow  figure out a way to move the pieces faster. 

And in 2011, Thor Aackerlund became the first  person to reach level 30 on video by vibrating  

his fingers to mash the controller  faster than the game's built in speed,  

a technique known as hypertapping. And because level 29 is the maximum  

speed in the game, all the levels  afterwards don't get any faster, so  

it was theoretically possible to go even higher. Thor's Level world record would stand for 7 years,  

until a teenage hypertapping prodigy  Joseph Saelee broke it in 2018 by  

becoming the first player to reach level 31. Joseph's skill would allow him to win two  

tetris world championship titles in 2018 and 2019 and he slowly kept pushing the level world record  

upwards all the way to level 35 until an even faster hypertapper  

EricICX came along and became the  first to reach levels 37 and 38. 

Now this was light years ahead of what anyone  would have expected when the game first came out 

but overall progress on the record  was still slow because hypertapping  

only barely made level 29 speed possible. Deep runs into the 30s still required getting  

good luck with the pieces and near perfect  placements with almost zero margin for error. 

In order to truly push things a lot further,  some kind of breakthrough was needed. 

But then a new technique came  along that would change everything. 

In 2020, a tetris player named cheez watched  a video on various button mashing strategies  

and had the epiphany to combine a multi-finger  technique by Hector Fly done on arcade cabinets  

and another technique that used a finger  on the bottom of the controller to push  

it into another finger on the top. He called this new technique rolling 

and it allowed him to easily  reach button mashing speeds  

over twice as fast as the quickest hypertappers. He became the first player to ever reach level 40,  

and although a hypertapper named Alex  Thach would end up taking the record back,  

he would be the last tapper ever to do so. Over the next few months there was a flurry  

of new records as most of the top players in the  scene switched over to the new rolling technique 

culminating in EricICX, now a roller,  shattering the record in 2021 by  

making it all the way to level 95. With the fastest speed in the game  

now fully mastered, it seemed like the sky  was the limit for how far players could go. 

But as it turns out, an even bigger  challenge was looming on the horizon. 

NES Tetris was originally designed with 10  normal looking color palettes for levels 0 to  

9 that were bright, colorful, and easily visible. Every time you go up 10 levels, the game loops  

then loops around back to the first color scheme. But because this game was coded in the 1980s,  

everything is written to try and  be extremely memory efficient 

so the line of code that's supposed  to determine the level color glitches  

out starting at level 138 and starts  pulling data from outside the color table 

resulting in a bunch of random bizarre  color palettes that can be difficult to see. 

If you're into code and wondering  exactly how and why this happens 

HydrantDude has made a great 2  minute explainer video on the  

subject that I'll link in the description. Obviously the colors glitch wasn't a problem  

when the game first came out because making  it to level 138 would have been a pipe dream 

but now players were actually  on the verge of getting there. 

Technically the first player to reach  the glitched colors was Fractal161 

but he opted to go for it on the lesser played  PAL version of the game which runs 20% slower  

than the much more common NTSC version that  is used in the World Championships and most  

of the main leaderboards, including this one. EricICX became the first person to achieve  

glitched colors on the NTSC version impressively managing to achieve it  

in an actual tournament match and making it all  the way to level 146 before a particularly dim  

level caused him to top out. He ended up winning the 2022  

world championships a few months later. But now the combination of challenges with  

visibility and sheer endurance were starting  to seriously slow down people's progress again 

as Eric's world record game  had lasted nearly 40 minutes. 

It took over a year before anyone was able to  get past the dim level that had taken out Eric 

and when a player named PixelAndy finally  managed to beat it, he got taken out by  

an even more difficult level featuring  pieces that were nearly pitch black. 

“Where are the colors? I can't see it! Nooooo I could - I couldn't see it. 

I couldn't see it on my screen. It's just - it just went dark.” 

So what was the future of the record? Slow incremental progress at  

increasingly difficult to see levels? Well, it turns out the most significant  

achievement yet was closer than anyone thought. Back in 2021, a programmer Greg Cannon had made  

a Tetris playing AI called  stackrabbit in order to push the  

game far beyond what was possible for a human. Not limited by stamina or eyesight, stackrabbit  

was able to fly past the most difficult glitched  color levels with ease, and Greg ended up coining  

names for each of the color schemes as they passed such as calling the dim level that took out  

Eric “Dusk”, and the black level  that took out Andy “charcoal”. 

Stackrabbit would continue to play through even  more bizarre glitches that happened later on,  

such as level 235 which lasts for  800 lines instead of the typical 10. 

But eventually, the game  just can't function anymore. 

“And there's the long bar, and it's gonna  crash the game with that tetris into level 237. 

Its final score is 102 million” So what's going on here? 

In the simplest possible  terms, the game is running  

on code which is instructions on what to do next and RAM which is its workspace where it calculates  

things and keeps track of what it's doing. The game's code starts to become really  

inefficient on very high levels, because  no one was expected to get this far,  

and eventually a glitch happens where the  game switches from reading instructions from  

the code to reading the RAM as if it were code. If the resulting garble generates a stop command,  

it completely breaks the game, leading  to it being called the true killscreen. 

If you want the full technical breakdown, again  HydrantDude has a great video on the topic that  

I'll link in the description. But here's the thing. 

The game crash doesn't always happen  in the same spot, because the glitch  

can get triggered by very specific things  depending on the level, such as what piece  

Subtitles ListPlay Video

After 34 Years, Someone Finally Beat Tetris

eventually

trigger

effort

technique