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34 years after the official release of Tetris on NES, a 13-year-old prodigy known as Blue Scuti is the first person to beat the game. Now the community is starting to look to new horizons - including a whole host of other potential endings.
The official, Nintendo-published NES edition was not the first (and certainly not the last) version of Tetris to be published, but it's become arguably the most important Tetris release for the competitive community, since it serves as the basis for the Classic Tetris World Championship series. Unlike some other versions of Tetris, this release doesn't have an official ending sequence or final goal to achieve. You're supposed to just keep playing until you eventually can't keep up with the speed of the falling blocks anymore.
At least, that's how it's intended to work. If you keep playing long enough, NES Tetris can eventually just crash when you reach certain conditions - like making a single-line clear on level 157, which has a 73.33% chance of crashing the game. That's exactly what Blue Scuti managed to do. Like the golden age arcade legends who "beat" Pac-Man by reaching the kill screen that crashed the game, Scuti beat Tetris by breaking it.
But there's a key difference between the Pac-Man kill screen and the Tetris kill screen - it's not inevitable. Since the Tetris kill screen only activates under certain conditions, you can theoretically keep playing indefinitely as long as you avoid those conditions. The video above from aGameScout is essential viewing if you want to know how it all works, but suffice to say that the community is already looking toward achieving other potential endings.
There are faster ways to achieve the kill screen, for example - you could trigger it a few levels earlier on 155. That's the goal of Fractal161, whose grind for the kill screen inspired Scuti's own efforts. And Scuti seemingly intends to go for the fast kill screen, too. He said in an interview that "If [Fractal] is going to go for an efficient game crash then I might as well, too."
But maybe the most impressive achievement would be done by not hitting a kill screen at all. Reaching level 255 - something that, to this point, has only been done by tool-assisted speedrun creators - causes the entire game to loop back to level 1, which might just be the truest ending of all. That'll just require someone to survive hundreds of levels of nearly impossible Tetris all while dodging the multitude of kill screen triggers that exist along the way. Can it be done? I don't know, but you can be darn sure these Tetris masters are going to try.
Maybe it's my time to become a world record holder with the Tetris McNugget?
