Professional Tetris player Willis "Blue Scuti" Gibson became the first person to "beat" Tetris some three decades after its original release by playing the game's most extreme...
A 13-year-old is the first human to beat Tetris | Numerous theoretical milestones remain::undefined
Here's a really fascinating video that explains the various NES Tetris controller techniques, including rolling, the new technique that's radically changed the way the game is played the last few years.
Thanks for sharing! I ended up following it up with the video this creator did on BluScutti and this top comment from BluScutti himself genuinely made me tear up a bit:
"Amazing video scout! Its amazing to be in one of your videos since your videos are what got me into the Tetris scene in the first place."
A lot of old games were intended to be played in an endless cycle--arcade games especially--but in practice there was always some kind of limit due to the hardware and coding practices at the time. Pac-man, for example, hits a level where half the screen is the normal maze and the other half is a random assortment of other sprites. Donkey Kong ends when Mario always dies at a certain level.
The NES Tetris limit hit here is a point where there are certain "random" chances of the game crashing depending on certain states. In his run, Blue Scuti actually missed getting the first possibility of hitting a crash and had to survive a few more levels to get the next one.
This isn't the full ending, though. TAS runs show that it is possible to get up to level 255 and then loop back to level 0. Getting there requires missing every single possibility of a crash, though, and the probabilities of that mount up as you go.
There was a 73% chance at the level it crashed that any single line clear would have caused it and the percentage only goes up from there. That is why there are theoretically more that could be accomplished since there is still a chance it won't crash but is very unlikely.
Wozniak was obsessed with Tetris, and would send his high scores to Nintendo Power Magazine.
Eventually, since nobody was able to touch his scores, Nintendo Power asked him to stop, so he (Steve Wozniak) started submitting them as "Evets Kainzow", and at least one of his scores was printed under that name.
So, yeah, he has a history as a (the?) Top human player of Tetris in an age past.