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.
“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
you have or how many lines you clear at once. And stackrabbit was actually playing on a modified
version of the game that has 7 digits in the score counter instead of six, so it didn’t have the same
crash points as an unmodified version. In 2022 there was a massive effort put
into researching the mechanics of the crash, and Hydrantdude made a spreadsheet
tallying up every possible 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 2023, after Fractal won the world championships and firmly established himself as the best current
player in the scene, he decided to start livestreaming daily attempts to get the crash.
But on the very first night of his grind, a player named Blue Scuti shocked the
scene by being the first player to ever beat charcoal and make it all the way to level 153.
Not only did this set a new level world record and score world record to boot,
it was only 18 lines away from the first crash. Scuti was a newer player in the scene who’d
recently been on a meteoric rise, achieving a surprise semifinals
finish in the 2023 world championships. And after 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 looked like
he could be getting it any moment. Less than 24 hours later on day 2 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? Oooohhh - oh okay.
Hahaha! Ahahaha!” Later on in the
night he succeeded in getting to the glitched colors but disaster struck when he hit dusk.
“Oh my god. No I got completely blindsided.” Despite not getting the game crash,
this game would actually end up taking back the score world record from blue scuti.
On day 3, Fractal started up again, ready for another evening of attempts.
But just 20 minutes into the stream, the chat alerted him
that blue scuti was currently on a big run. “Wait, what is Scuti - what is Scuti at right now?
Hooooo my god” Blue Scuti was on a roll,
having reached the glitched 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 old record and making it to 154.
This was it - he just needed a single on the final line clear to get it.
But then, 4 lines in, he misdropped. 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 a long bar dependency but oh no! *gasp* “I missed it.”
He’d accidentally passed by the crash trigger by clearing a triple instead of a single!
Scuti marched onward, unsure of when he’d get another chance.
“Oh my god. Just please crash.” The next available target was on level 157,
where every one line clear would have a 73% chance of triggering the crash.
But as Scuti entered the level, he suddenly started to misdrop 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 happened.
“Oh…oh…oh…oh my god” Immediately reactions poured
in from the rest of the community. “Ohohhh 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 NES 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 for the scene as a whole.
At the time cheez invented the new rolling playstyle,
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 lineouts 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 score world 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 speedrunning the crash or trying to get the
highest possible score before it. “I know fractal, he said that he was
interested in going for an efficient game crash so I think he’s definitely gonna be
coming back for the world record.” “If he’s gonna go for an efficient
game crash then I might as well too.” And Blue Scuti 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’s said that he practices around 3-5 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 to 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 fundamentally different type of challenge than any
previous one in the game. Instead of being rivals,
the player and the game would 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
that 5 of the 7 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 0.
The game officially resets back to the beginning. If the original killscreen was the game’s way of
beating the player, and the true killscreen 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.
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 SuperAnthony,
the creator of Joltzsi. Joltzsi 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 clear complete lines on a grid - but with a twist.
If you 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 4, you top out and the game is over.
The biggest possible move is a giant grid of 4, known as a Joltzsi.
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 would be able to score on this.
The game is available for early access play on February 13,
so if you'd like to play, you can either add it to your steam wishlist or follow
Anthony on twitter for future updates through the links in the description.
Thanks to Joltszi for being a sponsor, and see you in the next video.