13-Year-Old Becomes First Person to Beat Tetris on NES

Chris Remington@beehaw.org to Gaming@beehaw.org – 112 points –
13-Year-Old Becomes First Person to Beat Tetris on NES
gizmodo.com
13

I love this game. I didn't think you could actually "beat" it.

Well, you really can't in a traditional sense. This isnt a victory screen, it's a kill screen. He got so far into the game it crashed and you can't continue. There are still more goals that can potentially be reached higher by avoiding the crash.

Streamer Blue Scuti has surpassed artificial intelligence by becoming the first known human to crash Tetris

He'd still be the first human even if AI did it first...

100% just slipped that in there for SEO purposes due to the current trendiness of "AI".

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: ::: spoiler Click here to see the summary Classic puzzle game Tetris has been around for over three decades, and in that time, plenty of people have reached its various endings, usually by clearing four rows of bricks at once like a digital demolitioner.

That’s a challenge in and of itself, but now, someone has taken the concept of “beating Tetris” to the extreme by playing the NES game so hard it straight-up crashed, a phenomenon also known as the “kill screen.”

Blue Scuti, who emerged on the competitive Tetris scene in December 2021 and won first place in a handful tournaments over the course of 2023, posted a video to their YouTube channel on January 2 showing them achieving the monumental feat.

As they ripped through Tetris’ myriad levels, the bricks falling at an ever-faster pace, Blue Scuti quipped about misplacing blocks here and there.

Regardless of miscalculations, though, Blue Scuti managed to crash the game after about 38 minutes of continuous play: the screen froze, the music stayed stuck on an endless note.

The technique revolutionized competitive Tetris play and let Blue Scuti break the game’s world records for overall score, level achieved, and total number of lines.


Saved 61% of original text. :::

I just learned about some of the manual techniques pro players have come up with to play Tetris at a high level. It's not my thing, but along with speedrunning, the level of community-driven ingenuity is inspiring.