FISCHER: You wanna clear those blocks, better do what you can

By Travis Fischer, tkfischer@charlescitypress.com

If you’ve caught any national headlines in the last few weeks, you may have seen a lot of hubbub about a kid beating “Tetris.”

You may have wondered what the big deal about that is. You may have even thought to yourself, “So what? I’m pretty sure I saw my older brother do that in the 80s.”

Let me assure you that you didn’t.

To explain the significance of what recently happened, you must first understand what it means to “beat” the game. Specifically, the North American release of “Tetris” for the NES.

Like most arcade ports of the 1980’s, this particular version of “Tetris” is not designed to ever actually end. There is no point where the game is programmed to give up, stop dropping blocks, and congratulate you with a “You Win!” screen.

In fact, for many years, Level 29 was considered as far as any human could go in the game because that’s when the game reaches its top speed and normal controller inputs stop functioning properly. It wasn’t until 2011 that the game’s top players developed unconventional controller techniques that would allow mortal man to break through that barrier. Once these techniques were developed and refined, records started shattering in the Tetris community. Players could go as far as human reaction time, endurance, and luck would allow.

Even then, no matter how many hundreds of lines you clear or thousands of points you rack up, there is still no victory screen waiting.

So, without a pre-programmed victory condition, “beating” the game means forcing it into a “killscreen.” In effect, this means running the game for so long that it figuratively gets tired, trips over itself, and crashes.

Relatively recently, a deep dive into the game’s code discovered a set of conditions to trigger a crash. The earliest of these triggers happens at Level 155, which wasn’t much higher than the world record at the time.

Thus enters our hero, Willis “Blue Scuti” Gibson, a 13-year-old newcomer to the Tetris scene that took 3rd place at last year’s Classic Tetris World Championship. Which yes, is a thing.

Gibson was just one of the high end “Tetris” players grinding to reach Level 155 last month, but he was the first to get there. And then he went further, missing the condition he needed to trigger the crash.

Shaking it off and continuing to clear lines, Gibson played on until the next opportunity presented itself at Level 157 and managed to trigger the killscreen, becoming the first known person to beat “Tetris” into digital submission.

This is cool.

It’s been heartening to see news articles worldwide reporting on Gibson’s achievement, the accolades that have followed, and the positive impact that this has had on the Tetris scene.

Likewise though, it’s been disheartening to read the comments of those news articles and find them full of people intent on diminishing that achievement. Or, in the case of the UK’s Sky News, snarky adlibs from a smug news anchor.

No, he wasn’t cheating. No, this didn’t happen all the time in the 80s and now we’re just recording it. No, the kid doesn’t need to go outside and do something with his life.

I can’t imagine being so small a person that bullying a 13-year-old for being good at a hobby would even cross my mind.

Willis Gibson is better at “Tetris” than most people will ever be at anything in their lives and he did a cool thing.

Just let it be cool and leave it at that.

– Travis Fischer is a news writer for the Charles City Press and got to “Tetris” Level 9 with a high score of 58,227 and feels pretty good about that.