this is Willis AKA blue scooty 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 oh my God he just became the
first person ever to trigger a game
Crash reaching the true kill screen
which is by far the biggest achievement
in the 34-year-old history of the pro
classic Tetris scene so why is this such
a big 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
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game an 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
kill screen because it always killed
your run except it wasn't a kill screen
in the traditional sense in retro games
a kill screen 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 kill screen 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 anas
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 acrin
became the first person to reach level
30 on video by vibrating his fingers to
mash the controller faster than the
games 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 in until a
teenage hypertapping Prodigy Joseph s
broke it in 2018 by becoming the first
player to reach level 31 Joseph 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 hyper Tapper Eric
IX 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
cheese 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 bun mashing
speeds over twice as fast as the
quickest hyper tappers he became the
first player to ever reach level 40 and
although a hyper Tapper named Alex
thatch 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
time top players in the scene switched
over to the new rolling technique
culminating in Eric IX 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
an even bigger challenge than speed was
looming on the
horizon inas Tetris was originally
designed with 10 normall looking color
palettes for levels 0 to9 L that were
bright colorful and easily visible every
time you go up 10 levels the game then
Loops back around 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 the code and
wondering exactly how and why this
happens hi dude has 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 glitch colors
was fractal 161 but he opted to go for
it on the much 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 Eric icx became the first
person to achieve glitched colors on the
ntsc version impressively managing to
get it in an actual tournament match and
making it all the way to level 146
before a particularly dim level cost 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 urance were
starting to seriously slow down 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 pixel Andy
finally managed to beat it he got taken
out by an even more difficult level
featuring pieces that were nearly pitch
black wait the colors I can't see it no
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
Canon made a Tetris playing AI called
stack rabbit in order to push the game
far beyond what was possible for a human
not limited by stamina or eyesight stack
rabbit 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 dust and the Block Level that
took out Andy charcoal stack rabbit
would continue to play through even more
bizarre glitches that happen 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 going to 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 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 kill screen if you want
the full technical breakdown again
hydrant dude 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 you have or how
many lines you clear at once and stack
rabbit was actually playing on a
modified version of the game that has
seven digits in the score counter
instead of six so it didn't have the
same crash spots as an unmodified
version in 2022 there was a massive
effort put into researching the
mechanics of the crash and hydrant dude
made a spreadsheet tallying up every
possible situ situation that could cause
the crash to be triggered yeah I know
the same guy again this guy's the MVP of
documenting all this stuff and it turns
out that the earliest possible trigger
for the crash on the unmodified original
version of the game was a single at the
transition into level
155 that actually wasn't too far off
from the world record a human might
actually be able to do that provided
they could get through Dusk and charcoal
in 20203 after fractal won the World
Championships and firmly established
himself as the best current player in
the scene he decided to start live
streaming daily attempts to get the
crash but on the very first night of his
grind a player named Blue scooty shocked
the scene by being the first player to
ever beat charcoal and make it all the
way to level
153 not only did the set a new level
world record and score world record to
boot it was only 18 lines away from the
first crash scooty was a newer player in
the scene who'd recently been on a
meteoric rise achieving a surprise
semi-finals finish in the 2023 World
Championships and after getting the
record he decided to challenge fractal
and start grinding for the game Crash
himself and later said in an interview
you know I just thought if I was so
close I might as well race him for it
and try and beat him to the crash but
fractal looks like he could be getting
it at any moment less than 24 hours
later on day two of the grind he had a
game early on that went all the way to
the level right before the glitched
colors are you
ready oh oh
okay later on in the night he succeeded
in getting to the glitch colors but then
disaster struck when he hit dusk oh my
God no I got completely
blindsighted despite not getting the
game crash this game would actually end
up taking back the score world record
from Blue scooty on day three fractal
started up again ready for another
evening of attempts but just 20 minutes
into the stream the chat alerted him
that blue scooty was currently on a big
run wait what is scooty what is scooty
at right
now oh my
God blue scooty was on a roll having
reached the glitch colors and easily
coasted through dusk with a low board
next up was charcoal he had a little bit
of trouble at the beginning but managed
to clutch a line piece to the left to
get the stack down to complete the level
now it was just a matter of carrying the
game to the Finish Line he slowly kept
Downing levels passing his gold record
and making it to
154 this was it he just needed a single
on the final line clear to get it but
then four lines in he Mis dropped now in
dig mode he started optimizing his stack
for survival instead of singles he
managed to open his board just in time
to fill the Long Bar dependency but oh
no I missed it he'd accidentally passed
the crash trigger by clearing a triple
instead of a single scooty marched
onward unsure of when he'd get another a
chance oh my God just please crash the
next available Target was on level 157
where every oneline clear would have a
73% chance of triggering the crash but
as scooty entered the level he suddenly
started to M drop again nothing was
clearing any lines his chances were
slipping away but in a last ditch effort
with a J piece to the left it
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happened oh my
God immediately reactions poured in from
the rest of the
community he did it he did it wait he
got it oh my god let's go the truly
crazy thing about this achievement is
that enas Tetris had always been
considered an unbeatable game no matter
how good you played eventually your
board would reach the top of the screen
and the game would be over this was the
first time ever where instead of the
game beating the player the player had
beaten the game and this really feels
like a turning point point for the scene
as a whole at the time chees invented
the new rolling play style he expressed
concern that it was too op and would
eventually destroy the scene but instead
it's caused the scene to have a complete
Renaissance concerns about tournament
games going too long due to endless line
outs have instead been replaced by ROM
patches adding a new faster speed at
level 39 that resulted in exciting
battles for bigger Line clears that are
worth more points the level and scoreb
Records once thought to be getting stale
as they turned into a mere endurance
challenge had suddenly given us the most
exciting record chase the community had
ever seen with the world records
Changing Hands multiple times in a
single week and now that the game Crash
has officially happened there's a ton of
possibilities of where the record
chasing can go from here players could
go for Speed running the crash or trying
to get the highest possible score before
it no fractal he said that he was
interested in going for an efficient
game Crash so I think he's definitely
going to be coming back for the world
record if he's going to go for an
efficient game Crash then I might as
well too and blue scoote as a person
feels like a representation of the very
best of what the community is at Live
Events he's always been a cheerful and
gracious competitor and he's shown that
hard work really can pay off as he said
that he practices around 3 to 5 hours a
day do you have anything to say to the
young players out there that may get
inspired to play because of this
historic game if you set your mind to
something and you put work into it most
likely you will get it if you try hard
enough his first Place finish at the
Kansas City Regional Championship this
past month was his first live tournament
Victory and if you'd like to see him
play live again his next appearance will
be at the Heart of Texas Regional
Championship in just a few weeks but one
final question remains after the game
Crash is there any major Milestone left
to achieve in the game as it turns out
the answer is yes what if instead of
intentionally trying to get the crash as
quickly as possible You Instead try to
avoid it just how far could you possibly
get in order to push the game further
beyond what humans and even AIS can
currently do some people in the
community have constructed tool assisted
speedruns AKA tases where instead of
being played in real time every move is
manually entered in this allows them to
simulate what it would look like if a
player was able to avoid all the
potential traps that could trigger the
crash this would become almost a
fundamental different type of challenge
than any previous one in the game
instead of being Rivals the player in
the game will be working together as a
team with the player doing everything
they can to ease the burden of the
game's ancient code limping along
keeping them both alive if both the
player and the game survived every
Pitfall the final level they would reach
is level 255 with a glitched color
scheme of pure red this is the last
level that can be stored in the game's
memory and things are so unstable T that
five of the seven pieces in the game
could trigger the crash when falling
normally so the player basically has to
push down on every piece to survive so
what happens when the level clears it
Loops right back around to level zero
the game officially resets back to the
beginning if the original kill screen
was the game's way of beating the player
and the true kill screen was the
player's way of beating the game beating
level 255 is the rebirth screen with
both the player and the game emerging
triumphant together together if it can
be done someday it will be the ultimate
final achievement of the original
game thanks so much to the patrons on
patreon who make videos like this one
and future videos possible with an extra
special thanks to channel sponsors Scott
Gray and super Anthony the creator of
jolt joli is a game that Anthony
originally conceived of when he thought
about what Tetris would look like if you
played it in 3D you arrange blocks to
complete lines on a grid but with a
Twist if your block lands on top of
another one it adds to the number on the
Block and then you need to make all the
numbers in that line the same value to
clear it but if a number goes above four
you top out and the game is over the
biggest possible move is a giant grid of
four known as a jolt SE I beta tested
the game and got the top score on the
leaderboard other than Anthony himself
and I can genuinely say it was a really
fun Take On The Puzzle game genre and I
can't even imagine how high a top Tetris
player will be able to score on this the
game is available for Early Access play
on February 13th so if You' like to play
you can either add it to your steam wish
list or follow Anthony on Twitter for
future updates through the links of the
description thanks again to joli for
being a sponsor and see you in the next
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video