Tetris news, like the game itself, never seems to end. The classic puzzle game returned to the news last week because something new with the game had been accomplished for the first time: beating it. Thought Tetris has no ending? Think again.
A 13-year old boy who goes by the name of Blue Scuti was live streaming an attempt to reach what's called a "kill screen"; a part of a game where the whole thing glitches and it's impossible to continue. And sure enough he was able to achieve this feat for the first time ever. You can watch as Willis do just that in the below video:
His reaction is priceless and well-deserved. No human had done this before, only a trained computer program called StackRabbit had gone this far. But how did it take so many years to get to this part of the game?
The definitive edition of Tetris is the NES version, released in 1989. This has been used in tournaments and in the past years it had seemed that level 29 was the 'end' of the game. At this stage of the game it the pieces fell too fast in order to move them into place. Then many years ago it was discovered that if you rolled your fingers onto the buttons and pushed the controller into the buttons (instead of pushing the buttons into the controller) you could play faster. This "rolling" technique has been a mainstay in the competitive gaming world since.
Over the past few years people have gone further and further into the game with this rolling gameplay style. At a certain point the NES and the code can't cope with how far you get. In fact there is an entire breakdown of how to crash the game when you get as far as Blue Scuti did. Scores don't add up, level numbers don't display, colors are random, and the math just... breaks.
The below breakdown from aGameScout breaks down the recent history of how Tetris was thought to have an end but then time and innovation brought us to where we are now. Both that and the above videos are awesome.
It's great to see someone achieve such a feat at such a young age. Congrats to a well-deserving player.