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.
