Because the original developers of Tetris never trusted players to push the game's limits so aggressively, bizarre phenomena began to occur at higher levels. (Photo: 123RF)
The video game Tetris, characterized by falling blocks, found its counterpart in Willis Gibson, a 13-year-old American who became the first player to officially “beat” the original version of the Nintendo game by “smashing” it.
Technically, Willis, nicknamed “Blue Scuti” in the gaming world, has reached what gamers call a “kill screen,” a point where the Tetris code goes haywire and stops the game. .
That might not be a huge win for someone who believes that only high scores count, but it's a coveted achievement in the gaming world, where records are all about pushing hardware and software to their limits.
It's also a very big deal for Tetris players, who many have long thought were unbeatable. This is partly because the game does not have a pre-written ending. These four-block shapes will continue to fall no matter how well you manage to stack them in vanishing rows. The best players kept finding ways to extend their winning streaks by staying in the game to reach higher and higher levels, but in the end the game beat them all.
Until December 21st, Willis managed to trigger a destruction screen at level 157, which in the video game world is considered a victory over the game, which goes in the direction of pushing the software beyond its own limits.
The makers of Tetris agree. “Congratulations to 'blue scuti' for this extraordinary achievement that pushes all preconceived boundaries of this legendary game,” Maya Rogers, president and CEO of Tetris, said in a statement. Maya Rogers noted that Tetris would be celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, and she called Willis' victory a “monumental achievement.”
Years of observations
The path was very long. At first, “people in the Tetris scene didn't even know how to get to these higher levels,” said David Macdonald, a video game YouTuber who has been following the video game industry for years.
“They just got stuck in levels 20 and 30 because they just didn't know how to progress,” he explained. Level 29 presented a particularly difficult obstacle as blocks began falling faster than the player could react.
Eventually, the players found ways to improve, as David Macdonald recounted in his detailed video of Willis' win. In 2011, level 30 was reached using a technique called “hypertapping”, where a player could rhythmically vibrate their fingers to move the gamepad faster than the game's built-in speed. This technique took players to level 35 in 2018 – they crashed into a wall.
The next major milestone was reached in 2020 when a player combined a multi-finger technique originally used in arcade video games by placing one finger on the bottom of the controller to press it against another finger on the top of the controller . This much faster approach, called “rolling,” helped one player reach level 95 in 2022.
Then other obstacles appeared. Because the original developers of Tetris never trusted players to push the game's limits so aggressively, bizarre phenomena began to occur at higher levels. A particularly difficult problem arose with the game's color palette, which traditionally featured 10 easily distinguishable patterns. However, from level 138 onwards, random color combinations appeared, sometimes making it much more difficult to distinguish blocks from the game's black background.
The contribution of artificial intelligence
It took a Tetris-playing artificial intelligence program called StackRabbit to break the deadlock by helping players identify where they might encounter a crack leading to a destruction screen and ultimately win the game.
StackRabbit, which reached level 237 before the game crashed, was running on a modified version of Tetris. Its performance is therefore not necessarily comparable to that of human players. Nor were his findings directly applicable to the game played by humans. But his runs clearly showed that endgame problems can be triggered by very specific events, such as which block pieces were in play or how many lines a player cleared at once.
This put human players in charge of working out every possible scenario that could lead to such crashes in the original game. This usually happened when decades-old game code lost its place and read the next instructions in the wrong place, usually resulting in unnecessary input. A tremendous effort driven by StackRabbit's experience ultimately led to the compilation of a large table detailing which specific gaming levels and conditions were most likely to result in a shutdown.
This prompted Willis to take a risk on the record. Still, he seemed shocked himself when he finished the game at level 157. In his live video, he appears to hyperventilate before repeatedly gasping “Oh my God,” clutching his temples and fearing he will pass out. After putting his hands over his mouth in an apparent attempt to regulate his breathing, he finally exclaims, “I can't feel my fingers.”