Deep into his attempt to become the first person in the 34-year history of Tetris for the NES to beat the game (or, specifically, play it until it breaks due to the game starting to read RAM as code once you reach a certain point), 13-year-old Willis ‘Blue Scuti’ Gibson—almost completely silent until now in his state of hyperfocus—utters the words“I missed it.”
It’s almost impossible to see due to the speed at which the Tetriminoes are falling down the screen this deep into the game, but Scuti had just missed an opportunity to become the first ever person to complete Tetris. Once you get past a certain point in the game, various combinations of line clearance can result in a crash; one of these, which would’ve 100% guaranteed a crash, was transitioning from Level 154 to 155 by clearing a single line. Scuti cleared three lines, which meant he had to play on for at least another two levels, at which point single line clearances only have a 70% chance of crashing the game.
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Te-Try Again
Undeterred, Scuti stoically carried on, at one point begging for the game to crash, as the Tetris blocks transitioned through awkward, broken colour palettes that start occurring this deep into the game, like charcoal and navy-and-green. Suddenly, Scuti clears a single line, the catchy Tetris music turns into a monotonous buzz, and the game crashes. It’s over. Scuti is the first person to have completed Tetris, also picking up the records for Overall Score, Level, Lines, and 19 Score along the way.
It’s an incredible achievement for someone so young, and who only started playing Tetris competitively eight months ago. Having heard that Classic Tetris world champion Justin “Fractal” Yu had begun his grind to try and become the first person to break Tetris, Gibson mobilised, having already gotten to within 18 lines of beating the game himself previously.
Inan interview with Classic Tetris, an elated Scuti revealed what the hardest part of the run was to him:
“My biggest struggle was, when the nerves started kicking after 30 minutes of play, was still trying to hit the 5-taps, because if you miss one five-tap, the run can end.”
In terms of colour palettes, Scuti highlighted the ‘Dusk’ colour palette (dark green and dark blue) as the toughest to see. “The green on my TV just doesn’t show up, like, at all. Charcoal’s just barely easier.”
While Wilson deserves all the plaudits, you may rightly wonder why it took 34 years for someone to finally break Tetris. That can partly be explained by the recent evolution in Tetris playstyle techniques. Until about four years ago, the dominant pro Tetris playstyle was hypertapping, which required super-nimble fingers and extremely rapid pressing of the d-pad. Some three years ago, pro player Cheez began experimenting with a new grip known as ‘rolling’, which involves rolling your fingers on the underside of the controller to effectively push the controller against your fingers on the d-pad.
High Rollers
Before long, Cheez swept a bunch of world Tetris records using his new technique, achieving the world’s first score maxout, first Level 44, among myriad other records. The technique completely deprecated hypertapping, as other pro players began to adopt it, effectively elevating professional Tetris to whole new levels of skill and speed, with a period of players constantly gazumping each others’ records one after the other. Suddenly, breaking Tetris—a goal that was all but impossible using hypertapping and therefore abandoned for years—became something that seemed within reach.
Gibson, having started playing professionally last year, came to Tetris using the rolling technique, benefitting from the massive evolutionary leap that Tetris has seen in the last couple of years. It doesn’t diminish his achievement of course, just places it in the wider context of Tetris history, and explains why it’s only now that someone has been able to achieve what he has.
