I’ll bet you thought it was impossible to “beat” Tetris on the NES… but that’s because your name isn’t Willis “Blue Scuti” Gibson.
Last month, the Tetris prodigy quite literally broke the game, clearing 1,511 lines before reaching the game’s never-before-seen kill screen. Blue Scuti is just 13 years old, and he’s part of a growing group of young players who have taken over the ranks of pro Tetris.
Blue Scuti and his peers are able to rack up such impressive line totals thanks to a strategy known as rolling. In rolling, the controller is pressed flat against your leg with your thumb hovering over the D-Pad. By tapping the back of the controller with your other hand, you can apply just enough pressure to the D-Pad to make pieces move across the screen (and where you want them to go to clear lines) at even the fastest levels.
While my own personal best of 214 lines is pretty decent for an amateur, Ars Technica explained how the pros are able to use rolling to push beyond the human limits found in a normal game of Tetris:
What makes Blue Scuti’s achievement even more incredible (as noted in some excellent YouTube summaries of the scene) is that, until just a few years ago, the Tetris community at large assumed it was functionally impossible for a human to get much past 290 lines. The road to the first NES Tetris kill screen highlights the surprisingly robust competitive scene that still surrounds the classic game and just how much that competitive community has been able to collectively improve in a relatively short time.
The whole world has come together to congratulate Blue Scuti, including Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris, and Henk Rogers, the developer who brought the game to the rest of the world in 1988. A surprise appearance from both men during Blue Scuti’s interview with NBC News gave the young player quite a shock.
Shortly after the new year, two other Tetris players also managed to reach the kill screen: Justin “Fractal161” Yu and Andy “P1xelAndy” Artiaga. Both regularly compete with Blue Scuti in tournaments around the country.
Blue Scuti’s record-setting playthrough was recently shared by Classic Tetris World Championship, and it’s been embedded above. He dedicated this accomplishment to his father, Adam Gibson, who passed away on December 14.