13-year-old boy reaches Tetris' 'True Killscreen,' historically beating game after 34 years

After over three decades, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) version of Tetris, has been beaten by a 13-year-old boy after reaching level 157, hitting the game's "true kill screen."

Willis "Blue Scuti" Gibson wrote history in the classic game last December 2023 with his fight to get to the new kill screen against current world Classic Tetris champion Justin "Fractal" Yu.

Amazingly, Blue Scuti missed the first crash point despite being the first to achieve the target. This resulted in a hectic few minutes as he attempted to reach a fresh location to obtain a kill screen, ultimately accomplishing his objective at level 157.

In case you don't know, "True Killscreen" is a fan's jargon after Blue Scuti's milestone in the game. It is called that way because, according to The Gamer,  it was assumed that level 29 was the Killscreen, but it reached more than that in his case.

In Tetris, as the level gets higher, the blocks fall faster, leaving players to think only for split-second moments. The speed usually maxes out at level 2019 so players believed that this was the end of the game.

History in the making

Blue Scuti became the first human in trillions of attempts to beat Tetris.

In 2011, Tetris pro player Thor Aackerlund achieved the legendary level 30 by breaking past the level 29 Killscreen using a novel method called "hypertapping."

According to Ars Technica, hyper-tapping is the "first known way to past the brick wall of Level 29."

In this technique, players use a "special grip that lets you vibrate a finger over the D-pad directions at least 10 times a second." Through this, you can "effectively skip the 'delayed auto-shift' (DAS) that limits how fast pieces can move laterally when the D-pad is held down."

Seven years later, Joseph Saelee eventually set a new record of reaching level 35 and continued to dominate the 2019 editions of the Classic Tetris World Championship.

Furthermore, another Tetris pro player, EricICX, achieved level 38—nine times higher than the "Killscreen" assumption.

In 2021, a new button-smashing technique was born called "rolling" by  Hector "Fly" Rodriguez, allowing players to reach higher levels.

After the technique was introduced, a gamer named Cheez mastered the rolling technique and eventually reached level 40.

Likewise, with this technique, EricICX quickly ascended to level 146, surpassing the first "Killscreen" by more than five times. In this level, there's a bug that rendered the color schemes drab and difficult to read. The blocks were almost pitch-black but one player, P1xelAndy, was able to beat it. 

Beyond Blue Scuti's level 157, YouTuber aGamerScout said that a careful player can hit level 255 if they avoid the increasing number of game crashes.