He is the man who arranges the blocks.
It’s pretty likely that everyone (or at least, most of us) has played Tetris at some point or another. And of the many, many versions of the game, the Nintendo Entertaiment System version of the game holds a special place in players’ hearts; if not for nostalgia, then maybe for the incredibly complicated history leading to how it was made. And now, for one 13-year-old boy in Oklaholma, it might just have even greater significance.
Why? Because he essentially beat it.
It’s worth knowing that Tetris in general has no actual end state; it just keeps going, getting faster and faster like many older games. So what counts as beating it? Well, the NES version will freeze once a player reaches a level so high that the game has reached the limits of its coding, leading to what’s called a kill screen. For decades, most believed that Level 29 was the furthest a player could go, as that’s around the point where the blocks start moving so fast it was believed that no human could keep up.
But recent years have seen that supposition destroyed. A new crop of players have been pushing the boundaries of what was thought possible in the game. They play further, faster, harder.
Enter Willis Gibson, 13, who goes by the name Blue Scuti online. Willis has been playing the NES version of Tetris since 2021. In a video uploaded on the 21st of December, 2023, Willis legitimately hits the game’s kill screen, in all likelihood the first person to ever hit it through raw skill. Prior to this, people had seen the screen, but only through hacking the game.
It’s never been done by a human before. It’s basically something that everyone thought was impossible until a couple of years ago.
Vince Clemente, Classic Tetris World Championship president
Previously, Willis has earned a name for himself as one of the top Tetris players in the country. The most recent championship saw him place 3rd overall. Now, though, he’s hit a point that other players will strive for.
As content creator and Tetris pro David Macdonald discusses in his video on the topic, new horizons have been opened up in the game now that an actual human has achieved the kill screen.
Now that it’s been done, there’s kind of a new phase or a new challenge. When we all found out this past year that, ‘Oh, the crash is possible, you could do it at this level,’ then people started racing to be the first to do it. But now there’s a whole new challenge, which is basically now, instead of going through the crash, how long can you go beyond the crash?
David Macdonald
Needless to say, Willis’ excitement is palpable in the video. And with another tournament coming up next month in Waco, Texas, it’s safe to say that he just might be the one to beat.
Source: New York Times
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