It's easy to start off yet it's really hard to master it.
Willis Gibson, New York Times interview
The Journey
Gibson said his Tetris journey began when he watched YouTube videos of the game and thus started his quest to gather the equipment necessary to play an old version of it. His mother, Karin Cox, bought Gibson a version of the NES called RetroN from a pawnshop. This new version of the console uses the same hardware as the original NES console and would allow the games to be played as they were originally intended. Ms. Cox also bought her son an old cathode-ray tube television that would allow Gibson to get started with his Tetris competitions.
"I'm actually OK with it," Ms. Cox said in an interview with the New York Times. "He does other things outside of playing Tetris, so it wasn't difficult to say OK. It was harder to find an old CRT TV than it was to say, 'Yeah, we can do this for a little bit.'"
Going for the Crash
Although gamers have hacked into the game's software in order to "beat" Tetris, Gibson, who in the last year became one of the top Tetris players in the country, is believed to be the first to have beaten it on the original hardware. There are AI bots and plugins that do show what is possible with the game, and they have been used in the past to train AI in completing games. This version of the competition, however, dubbed "Going for the Crash", does not allow emulated software. "The main strategy is just playing as safe as you can," Gibson said.
David Macdonald, a video game content creator and competitive Tetris players known online as aGameScout said, "It's a bit more complicated than that." In recent years of competitive Tetris play, players have used the "rolling technique," which is a method using several fingers to quickly tap the buttons on the controller instead of just one or two. This changed what could be possible in competitive Tetris. This allowed more top players to "go for the crash," instead of just accumulating as many points as possible before the game defeats them.
The Glitch
In Macdonald's YouTube video, he talks about what causes the crash. It is actually a game bug that causes the crash, and that bug can happen at any time past a certain level as the game enters what is called "overflow." Overflow occurs when an integer variable, limited to 255 on the classic NES console, "rolls over" back to 0. In many cases, especially with old NES games, this integer variable controls the level that's displayed, the color palate, and many other aspects of the game. When this number rolls over, players can expect to see graphical glitches or even experience crashes. In short, the game simply doesn't know what to do and this point is called the "kill screen."
When competitive Tetris players go for the crash, they clear lines in a specific order. This order of clearing lines tricks the game's code into continuing, thus allowing the player to progress further. Many other competitive Tetris players have crashed the game at various points, but Gibson was the first to do it at such a high level. There are many other points about the game's code that are taken into consideration, and spreadsheets have been made to assist players in reaching those high levels.
For now, Willis Gibson remains the only player to reach level 157 on original NES hardware. How long that remains true is up to the rest of the competitive Tetris world.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments!
WRITTEN BY Jess
EDITED BY Jess
IMAGES SOURCED FROM Tetris-Assembly-8086 - Sportskeeda
I was rubbish at Tetris, although it was pretty much the only game I played on my Gameboy back in the day. That music…. Didn’t it also make it into the pop charts at one point?