After 34 years, Blue Scuti is the first player to finally reach the game’s kill screen!
Tetris is a mainstay of the video game world, but when it comes to the NES version, no one could claim to have “beaten” the game. When it comes to Tetris on NES, there isn’t an official end to the game, but you can theoretically reach what is referred to as its kill screen, which is where the game hits a point that it becomes unplayable. This can be due to a glitch of some kind, typically owing to an oversight in design or error in coding. For 34 years, no one had yet reached through natural play the kill screen on NES… until now.
Enter 13-year-old game maestro Blue Scuti:
In brief, back in the day players believed that Tetris ended with level 29 owing to the intense, seemingly insurmountable speed that the tetrominoes fall at. It turns out that level 29 is not the end, and that it’s possible to push even further into the game, albeit with new challenges to deal with like terrible color combinations that make the bricks very hard to see. Players have been striving to see how far they can go, and now, after an intense battle between competitors Fractal and Blue Scuti, the end has been reached. At level 157, Scuti encountered the kill screen and the rest is now history.
Congrats to Scuti for the dedication! Gamers double his age and older had yet to reach this milestone, and here he is barely a teenager with quite the feather in his cap. A feat worthy of a snapshot to send into Nintendo Power, back in the day, this writer would say.
Source: Time Extension
