By: Chuck Miller
Having Fun

Tetris beaten by a 13-year-old

You remember the electronic puzzle game Tetris, right? The falling brick game that was part of the Golden Age of video games, right up there with Space Invaders and Asteroids and Pac-Man and Defender. Those were the games where you played until the odds were too overwhelming. You couldn’t defeat the aliens, you could just hope to survive longer than the next kid with a pocketful of quarters.

And if you’ve played Tetris at any point in your life, you know that no matter how many times you clear those rows of bricks and blocks, at some point the blocks will fall so quickly that you won’t be able to keep up. Beep beep, game over.

Let me introduce you to a 13-year-old kid with the online name of Blue Scuti. 

Blue Scuti is playing Tetris on the old Nintendo Entertainment System. And they’re filming themselves doing so. Little by little, the blocks keep falling. Little by little, they drop the blocks in the right spot to clear the rows.

At some point, Blue Scuti actually scores more points than the online tally can calculate. But Tetris won’t give up. And neither will them.

At some point, Blue Scuti even surpasses the number of announced rounds on the game, forcing the program to switch to alphanumeric coding to continue. 

And then … at 38 minutes into the battle … Blue Scuti does something that no human who ever played Tetris on the NES has done. They’ve beaten the game. Tetris couldn’t keep going, and it froze solid. Now the game has been broken before, but only by the use of artificial intelligence programs. No human has ever outplayed the game. Until NOW.

You should see Blue Scuti’s reaction. Total shock and joy and excitement and relief. This is so cool. 

Here’s Blue Scuti’s entire run on the Tetris game. If you want to see the reaction … speed to 38 minutes of the video and you’ll smile as well.

For more background on this achievement, check out this recap video.

Damn. That’s just straight-up ice, if you ask me. 

Now I need to dig out that old Sega Genesis and see if I can get the little hedgehog to pick up all the rings again. :D