A thirteen-year-old teenager became the first person to “beat” Tetris for the NES before the game crashed (killscreen). The achievement comes 34 years after the game’s launch in 1989. Willis, who goes by Blue Scuti, was also the first to reach level 157. As classic Tetris community channel aGameScout notes, this is “the greatest achievement in the 34-year history of the professional Classic Tetris scene.”
The original Tetris was developed in 1984, the most popular of which is the classic version, released on the 8-bit NES console in 1989. There is still an active community of players that holds competitions and records achievements.
Record history
Tetris NES players will reach the maximum game speed at level 29. Reaching this level is considered quite an achievement, but from this point on Tetris blocks fall so quickly that reaching higher levels is almost impossible through traditional methods.
After level 29, simply pressing left or right on the controller will not correctly control falling blocks. Players encounter the delayed auto-sliding (DAS) feature built into Tetris. Thus, level 29 was considered the final level for decades because it was impossible to manipulate the pieces in a way that would clear the rows.
In 2011, player Thor Akerlund reached level 30 by vibrating his fingers in a special way to bypass DAS – after which the “hyper-tapping” technique became generally accepted. Aakerlund’s record stood for seven years.
In 2018, Joseph Sully reached level 31 and then broke his own record, level by level, several times, reaching level 35 in 2020. The video states that getting through level 30 still requires some luck with block drops.
A big update to Tetris NES players’ arsenal came in 2020 when player Cheez introduced the “rolling” technique. Vibration on the bottom of the controller allowed buttons to be pressed twice as fast as a fast hypertapper. Gamers were given much more control, making passages of more than 29 levels much more common. Thanks to the new method, Cheez reached level 40 in 2021. Things got better for the players and EricICX reached level 95 in 2022.
Interestingly, after level 138, the colors of the blocks can become confused and make them invisible against the general background. These visual obstacles slowed the climb to higher levels in the 2020s, but PixelAndy still reached level 148 in November 2023. And it was this record that Blue Scuti broke.
Is 157 the highest level in the game?
It’s not actually the highest Tetris level possible. In 2021, developer Greg Cannon created a bot for the game to look at levels that were inaccessible to humans. His StackRabbit program reached level 237 before Tetris crashed. Reaching level 255 would reset the game to level 0.
Killscreen occurs during long gaming sessions due to a byte overflow error. The level at which failure occurs is probably not hard-set and depends on previous actions. It was believed that it was possible to see a killscreen at level 155. The thirteen-year-old gamer succeeded on December 21, 2023, when he reached level 157 – slightly higher. The complete “walkthrough” of the game is also above, in the last video.
Source: Tom’s Hardware
