After 34 years, a 13 year-old prodigy has become the first person to 'beat' Tetris by reaching the holy grail of high-level play: a 'true killscreen'

03.01.2024 - 17:50 / pcgamer.com

Over three decades have passed since Tetris made its debut on the NES in 1989. Since then, a holy grail has lied just out of reach—the «true killscreen». Now, a young prodigy has managed to reach it: after 34 entire years, a flesh-and-blood person has finally beaten Tetris.

Some explanations are in order: a killscreen is a term used in the retro game community. It's different to an endscreen in that it crashes the game, creating a state where it's impossible to get further. This is only usually possible in arcade games that are designed to be played endlessly—in an excellent explanation, YouTube channel aGameScout uses the example of PacMan, which breaks down at around level 256.

In Tetris, this word is informally applied to level 29—except it's not actually a killscreen in the classical sense. Level 29 is the fastest NES Tetris gets, making a «true killscreen» possible for a human to reach. In 2011, a player managed to get past this killscreen by «hypertapping», an injury-inducing tactic where you vibrate your fingers to achieve rapid-fire inputs.

In 2020, Hypertapping was replaced by «rolling». Rolling is done by applying pressure to the controller while drumming your fingers along the back of it, essentially making the button come to you. This allowed a competitive player Cheez_Fish to move blocks faster than any player had before, and it soon became standard practice. It also isn't murder on your hands, which is a big plus.

Since the game speed doesn't increase past level 29, one would think that means reaching a true killscreen on Tetris is only a matter of time—well, not necessarily. Not only does the game start to throw glitched-out colours at you, but the requirements to trigger a crash are hyper-specific.

Initially, it was thought that the game's true killscreen kicks in at level 237, discovered by an AI playing the game. However, that AI was using a slightly modified version of the game's code. Luckily, Tetris boffin Hydrant created a spreadsheet to suss out the earliest possible killscreen—triggered by clearing a single line of blocks in the transition to level 155. 

As for the colours, aGameScout explains: «The line of code that's supposed to determine the level colour glitches out starting at level 138 and starts pulling data from outside the colour table,» which results in some unintended but super cool challenge levels. Pieces that are dim, pieces that are nearly pitch-black—while the speed doesn't increase, it definitely gets a hell of a lot harder. These levels gained fan-assigned names, like Dusk and Charcoal.

That's about 40 minutes of high-stakes Tetris where a player has to be laser-focused, employ physically demanding techniques with pinpoint accuracy, get past levels with