NES Tetris might be 35 years old this year, but it's still a mainstay of the competitive Tetris scene, which has been surprisingly active over the past decade.
This is because, during that time, new techniques were discovered that have allowed the world's best Tetris players to set world records that, back at the time of release, weren't considered to be even remotely possible.
Now, 13-year-old Tetris player Willis "Blue Scuti" Gibson has effectively "beaten" the game by reaching Tetris' "kill screen" – a point in the game where a crash means further progress isn't possible.
The video below does a fantastic job of explaining why this is such a big deal, but, in short, it was once thought that level 29 was Tetris' unofficial kill screen, as the speed of the falling blocks meant that players couldn't manipulate them into position.
However, a new strategy called "hypertapping" was discovered that allowed players to push past level 29. This was then superseded by a technique called "rolling", which was even more effective. The level 29 limit became a thing of the past, with players moving past level 100 and beyond as new records continued to be set.
However, at this point, another problem raised its ugly head – after a certain point, the block colours in NES Tetris start to glitch out, and one random combination of colours causes blocks to almost become invisible, making progress tricky. Even so, a fierce competition erupted between Tetris players Fractal and the aforementioned Blue Scuti, who recently managed to trigger the kill screen for the first time in history.
So there you have it; Tetris has been "beaten". It's incredible to see how the game has been pushed past its limits all these years after release – but it's even more amazing to think that someone who has only just become a teenager is the one to have done it.