A 13-year-old American gamer, known for streaming gameplay, accomplished what was once deemed unattainable — defeating the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) version of the game Tetris.
On Tuesday, Willis “Blue Scuti” Gibson, the young game streamer, shared a 42-minute-long video on YouTube. This video documented the remarkable gaming session in which he carved his name as the first-ever person to surmount Classic Tetris on NES, a record unbroken for 34 years since the game’s release.
At around the 38-minute snapshot of the video, the game is seen to halt after Gibson successfully completes 1,511 lines. This pause is known to be an intentional aspect of the game, signifying the player’s total completion of it.
Previously, Level 29 was widely acknowledged as the game’s “killscreen”, a stage which only an artificial intelligence had ever conquered, prior to Blue Scuti’s recent feat.
Gibson astonishingly made it to Level 157 before the game decided to end. The game’s enthusiasts now refer to this level as the “final killscreen.”
To claim victory, the young Tetris Pro leveraged a technique known as rolling, which gained popularity in 2020. This approach lets the gamers outpace the NES controller’s buttons by quick-tapping its underside, leading to numerous new world records in Tetris in recent years.
In conversation with Classic Tetris World Championship’s (CTWC) ITZSharky1, Gibson humbly dedicated this remarkable achievement to his late father.
It’s worth noting that in regions outside the United States, including South Africa, the NES was referred to as the Nintendo Family Computer (Famicom) and sported a different design.