The retro gaming community was thrilled to see a 13-year-old achieving a true kill screen on the NES classic, Tetris.
Gaming used to be very tough back in the day, this was partially due to how short the contents were, so developers usually opted for harder gameplay to give more time for players to finish the game. Nowadays, a game can be infinitely filled with content as everything can be randomly generated, making it basically an endless run of some sort. For the games back in the day, however, finishing an entire game could take a month as sometimes beating a level could take inhumane skills.
Take Pac-Man in the arcades for example, with the original Pac-Man being ported over a lot of consoles, the Nintendo Entertainment version was the best and optimal version to get after the arcade version. Pac-Man on the NES would provide hours upon hours of gameplay thanks to its evenly-paced difficulty progression, therefore it was a worthy investment. Same with another classic NES title, Tetris, which has the basic premise of just setting blocks in for hours end.
But, what if someone were to reach the end level after their efforts? Do those games actually have an end for beating them to the fullest? To be brutally honest, the answer is no, as developers never thought of someone beating the entire game, that is why they have “kill screens”. Kill screens are basically indicators that the game has run out of levels or memory to display, leading the game to a crash or a full reset. Both Pac-Man and Tetris have their own kill screens because they are supposed to be infinitely looping.
One brave young man was able to reach the kill screen of Tetris 34 years after its release on the Nintendo Entertainment System. 13-year-old Willis “Blue Scuti” Gibson, a professional Tetris player, was doing another run of the classic title until he actually hit the highest tier of lines with a 999999 score, then his game proceeded to crash. He stated that he was never expecting the game to crash or beat it, so he was as surprised as we were.
Kill screens are very rare to come by as they take lots of skill and determination to reach. What makes Blue Scuti’s achievement important is his young age and the fact that nobody has beaten this record for 34 years. Who knows, maybe other games like Asteroids or Centipede have their kill screen to be reached next.
