Tetris Kill Screen Reached by 13-Year-Old as He Becomes First Person to Beat Original Game

The original Tetris kill screen has been discovered by an unlikely candidate nearly 35 years after the game’s initial release. Willis Gibson, known in competitive Tetris circles as Blue Scuti, is a 13-year-old boy who just became the first person ever to reach Tetris’ true end screen.

The VOD of Gibson’s victory, which was uploaded to YouTube, can be seen in full here:

The video above has been timestamped to 38:20, which is right before he causes the game to crash, reaching the final “kill screen” for the game for the first time in history. Gibson has an understandably enthusiastic reaction, hyperventilating and repeatedly exclaiming, “oh my god!” He also makes a comment about being unable to feel his hands, which tracks given how hard he must have been playing to set this record.

For more context, the kill screen is the stage of the game in which Tetris’ programming basically overloads and freezes the game entirely. While its existence has been known for some time thanks to experiments done with Tetris-playing bots, no human player has ever reached said screen until now. At level 157, which is in and of itself an impressive record, Gibson triggered the kill screen for the first time in history.

It’s great to see such a young gamer achieve something like this. In truth, it’s probably something that can only be accomplished with the sort of free time a 13-year-old has, and it’s inspiring to see him hit a record that countless other gamers have been working towards for literal decades. There’s a bright future for Blue Scuti in the world of Tetris.

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