A 13-year-old Tetris prodigy made global headlines when he became the first person to beat the NES version of the classic puzzle game back on December 21 - 34 years after its original release. Now, less than three weeks later, two more players have managed to follow suit.
This video from aGameScout is essential viewing if you want to understand just how significant beating NES Tetris is and why it's taken so long to happen. In short, the NES game is the version played as part of the Classic Tetris World Championship, and thus is the one that most high-level players train in. It doesn't technically feature a formal ending. Instead, players have sought to reach a kill screen - a level of difficulty that the developers never intended players to reach, and one where the code is so unstable that certain actions will cause the game to crash, creating a certain sort of 'ending.'
The 13-year-old you've seen all the headlines about, Blue Scuti, was the first player to reach a kill screen, but he wasn't the only person trying. The race to this achievement was inspired by another player called fractal161, and a small handful of other top Tetris masters have also been grinding out attempts. It's worth noting that reaching these levels of the game would've been literally impossible years ago, since it's only relatively recently that players figured out the sorts of specialized button-mashing techniques that make this ultra-high-level play possible.
The other thing to remember is that NES Tetris has multiple kill screens, each of which triggers under different conditions. Scuti's kill screen was activated by reaching level 157 and making a single line clear. But the original kill screen target was on a single line clear on level 155 - a target that Scuti missed. That means that while Scuti was the first person to ever reach a kill screen, the door for reaching the most efficient possible kill screen was wide open.
And on January 3, fractal161 - the player who inspired this challenge in the first place - managed to reach the level 155 kill screen. The wild part is that just one day later on January 4, another player called P1xelAndy also reached the efficient kill screen. It remains to be seen who the next will be, or if anyone will ever manage to complete what seems to be the game's loftiest challenge: avoiding every possible kill screen until level 255, where it all wraps back to level 1.
Tetris players have spent decades developing the shared knowledge necessary to reach the kill screen, and it looks like all the work has suddenly resulted in what might just be the most fascinating speedrun challenge I've ever seen.
The best NES games have a lot of life left.
