First player to reach the killscreen in Tetris (NES)

The first player to reach what's called the "killscreen" (the point at which the game crashes) in the Nintendo Entertainment System version of Tetris (1989) is Willis Gibson (aka "Blue Scuti"; USA). On 21 December 2023, during a livestreaming session, Gibson reached level 157 (in a game designed to effectively cut off at level 29) and racked up 6,850,560 points before the game froze, ending the run.

The Classic Tetris World Championship has been held annually since 2010. At the time of the first tournament, it was assumed that no-one could play the game's high-score mode (Type A) past level 29, which is the point at which the blocks start falling faster than the controls can move them around the screen. The challenge that players were focused on at the first event was maximizing their score before that threshold – known as the "killscreen" – was reached.

Then came "hypertapping". This is a technique built around the discovery that by hammering the buttons incredibly fast, the pieces can be made to move more quickly than they would if the player simply held the button down. This method was popularized by Koji Nishio (aka “Koryan”), but the possibilities it offered were not clearly demonstrated until September 2018, when Joseph Saelee hypertapped his way past the original killscreen to level 31.

The next innovation, and the one that enabled Gibson's 2023 achievement, was what's called "rolling". This was devised in 2020 by Christopher Martinez (aka “CheeZ”), who worked out that players could achieve even faster speeds by squeezing the d-pad with fractionally less force than was needed to register as a button press, and then drumming their other fingers on the back of the gamepad. This was not only faster, but much less physically taxing than hypertapping.

With these techniques in place, players have been competing not only to set high scores, but also to find out if there is a point at which a Type-A game actually ends – a true "killscreen" that marks the end of the game. It is this quest that ended with Gibson's December 2023 high-score run. The players that were attracted to this challenge, which requires lightning-fast reflexes and nimble fingers, were mostly only in their teens. The 2022 Classic Tetris World Championship final was contested by 13-year-old Michael Khanh Artiaga (aka “Dog”) and his 15-year-old brother Andy Artiaga (aka "PixelAndy"). Willis Gibson accomplished his historic first a few weeks shy of his 14th birthday.

The new killscreen occurs because the game's code is constantly incrementing various hidden counters as it is played. These not only track scores, but also trigger transitions between different game states (adjusting the speed, for example, or advancing through levels). The size of the numbers that an 8-bit system like the NES can hold is quite limited, which means that the longer these counters are allowed to run – past the point that the developers assumed the game would end – the more likely they are to max out, or roll back over to zero. When this happens, the consequences can be strange – display glitches, corrupted sound, and finally, a total crash of the system.

In the aftermath of his achievement, Gibson was interviewed by global media outlets and got an opportunity to meet Alexey Pajitnov, the original developer of Tetris. He also secured a sponsorship from popular science and education company Complexly.