You weren't supposed to get this far

December 23, 2023 2:07 AM

On Thursday, 34 years after the game's original release, a human player crashed NES Tetris for the first time. The game's original programmers assumed that nobody would get past the "killscreen" where speed doubled at level 29, but using the "rolling" technique discovered in 2020, players have been playing deeper into the game than ever before. It was known that a crash was possible after level 155 due to flaws in the scoring code, but no human had ever reached this point. 13 year old "Blue Scuti" was on level 157 and had been playing at killscreen difficulty for over half an hour, with a world-record highscore over 6.8 million, when he became the first human player ever to crash the game (full game video).
posted by automatronic (15 comments total)

34 years without a (known) crash is a pretty good run for any piece of software.
posted by credulous at 5:08 AM on December 23, 2023 [33 favorites]

(known, not caused by tool-assisted input)
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 5:45 AM on December 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

It does warm my cold, dead, born-in-1986 heart to learn that the NES is still relevant.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 6:13 AM on December 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

The mom: “What? You did it? High-five buddy.” I don’t think the parents or the dogs are fully grokking this moment but that’s ok. 🙌
posted by amanda at 8:23 AM on December 23, 2023

Born-in-1986, the hardware was born-in-1983.

That the score overflows and crashes is not surprising, but it's unprotected because it's so unlikely a human would hit so high a score.
posted by k3ninho at 8:28 AM on December 23, 2023

What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god,
posted by cron at 8:45 AM on December 23, 2023 [20 favorites]

My mother was the Tetris player back in the day. I could never get into it, but she beat Tetris. Unfortunately she was very disappointed, "It just speeds up and kills you! What kind of ending is that!" Today, this can be her revenge.
posted by blnkfrnk at 10:19 AM on December 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

I'm not even a tetris player, but this was really moving!
posted by inexorably_forward at 11:52 AM on December 23, 2023

Kind of reminds me of an old Intellivision game, Vectron, whose manual promised "a special visual treat!" for anyone who completed level 99.

If you save-state or otherwise emulator-cheat your way there, you see:

"CONGRATULATIONS. YOU ARE VERY GOOD"

because they ran out of memory on the cartridge to program anything, but the programmer was like "no one will ever get near there anyway."
posted by delfin at 12:54 PM on December 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

the crash in the video is at about 1:09:00 if you’re wondering and man that kid is pleased
posted by dis_integration at 3:54 PM on December 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

man that kid is pleased

I like that he very quickly realizes what's happened, but then his brain has no idea to do with that information. So he just effusively emotes for a few minutes before having to just walk away. It's so pure.
posted by Panjandrum at 5:04 PM on December 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is the video on YouTube with an interview with the kid at the end. His (recently deceased) father is younger than Tetris. There's a nice profile in his hometown paper when he placed third at the world championships in October this year.
posted by calwatch at 10:38 PM on December 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is a video from someone whose record was beaten putting the achievement in context.
posted by calwatch at 1:54 PM on January 1, 2024

This is a great 17-minute video that goes through the background leading up to Blue Scuti's achievement including some of the different button mashing styles that have allowed people to get so deep into the game. Really great context for me, who doesn't know anything about competitive Tetris.
posted by msbrauer at 5:13 PM on January 3, 2024

Meanwhile, UK Sky News presenter Jayne Secker decided to belittle Gibson and his achievement, saying he should 'go out and get some fresh air'.

Secker has previous for this sort of thing.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 1:23 AM on January 6, 2024