A week ago Blue Scuti, AKA Willis Gibson, hit a surprising pinnacle of human achievement; beating the NES version of Tetris by reaching its kill screen. Today Willis received an award he did not expect to come (but maybe he should have).
Tetris was created by Alexei Pajitnov in 1985. Businessman and game developer Henk Rogers, after seeing the game in action and recognizing its potential, maneuvered a messy legal rights battle with rivals to license the game for Nintendo, outside of its motherland, and to make it a global phenomenon.
Alexei and Henk struck a lifelong friendship as a result of Henk’s little adventure, and Henk was always determined to make sure that Alexei would get his share of what the little game that could made around the world. In 1996, the two jointly launched The Tetris Company, starting a professional relationship that continues even after Pajitnov’s retirement.
Nintendo made Tetris the pack-in game for the original Game Boy, realizing its potential as a system seller. Interestingly enough, there are three versions of the game on the Famicom/NES hardware. Willis hit his world record on the version Nintendo themselves made for the West, published in 1989.
So, you may not really understand Willis’ achievement, only hearing that he had ‘beaten’ Tetris. Nintendo did not design Tetris to have an official ending. So what Willis did was reach the game’s kill screen, AKA the point where the game is forced to the edge that it can no longer run properly, and just crashes.
But Nintendo’s Tetris is a home console game. Unlike Donkey Kong or Pac-Man, where the kill screen will just come up in the arcade if you play long enough, when you max out the 9,999,999 score on Tetris in one of the modes, it’s not enough. You have to max out the same score across multiple modes of Tetris, in one sitting, to do it.
As explained by the BBC, this achievement was previously achieved by a Tetris AI called StackRabbit two years ago. It was believed then that it was not possible for a human to achieve the same thing. So what made the difference for Willis?
Willis was of course supported by an active competitive Tetris community, and he had his youth on his side. The Tetris community shared a new technique with each other called rolling – by tapping the back of the controller, it was possible to move the NES d-pad faster than by using your own hands.
If you felt sorry that Willis was maligned by that one Sky News anchor, you don’t need to feel bad for him anymore. In an interview with NBC News, he got to video conference with Alekei and Henk themselves! They got to congratulate him on his achievement, and he got to thank them in turn.
For those of us who are lifelong fans of Tetris, who may be playing Tetris 99 nowadays, this was a magical moment for all of us players everywhere. We may not all be able to hit the NES’ Tetris killscreen, but we can all enjoy the camaraderie of Tetris continuing to be a relevant game to this day.
You can watch the NBC News interview segment with Willis, Alexei, and Henk below.
