On December 21, 2023, Blue Scuti became the first person to beat NES Tetris by crashing the game. It was a phenomenal moment that the Classic Tetris community has witnessed. It took 34 years for this to happen.
Blue Scuti’s Impressive Run at the 2023 Classic Tetris World Championship
Prior to going for the game crash, he made his debut appearance at the Classic Tetris World Championship (CTWC) in 2023.
In the qualifying round, players were given 2 hours to get as many Maxouts as possible.
(What is a Maxout? In NES Tetris, the score caps at 999,999, which is known as a Maxout. For the sake of simplicity, some people just say that a Maxout is 1 Million points.)
Players were ranked based on the number of Maxouts, with their highest Non-Maxout score (Kicker) used as the tiebreaker.
Blue Scuti had qualified for the tournament by getting an impressive 14 Maxouts. This earned him the #4 Seed.
Check out all of his matches below
- Round 1 (Top 32) – vs Daasiann
- Round 2 (Top 16) – vs Myles
- Quarterfinals – vs Hfulufgus (Huff)
- Semifinals – vs Sidnev
- Scuti’s Interview
Needless to say, his CTWC performance was impressive. This caught the attention of the Stillwater News Press, who interviewed Blue Scuti and his mother.
Here are all of the 2023 CTWC Matches
Competing at the CTWC 2024 Kansas City Regional
To start the CTWC 2024 World Tour, the Kansas City Regional was held on December 2, 2023.
Blue Scuti had qualified as the #1 Seed.
Was his CTWC run a fluke? Check out all of his matches below
- Quarterfinals – vs aGameScout
- Semifinals – vs Myles (a rematch from Round 2 of CTWC 2023)
- Finals – vs Rhubarb
- Scuti’s Interview
Here are all of the Kansas City Regional matches.
What was very special about his appearance in this tournament was that his family was also there to support him. They were sitting behind him, rooting for him to win the tournament.
The Classic Tetris community got the chance to hangout with Blue Scuti and his family after the tournament when they had dinner at Joe’s Kansas City Bar-B-Que.
Going for the Game Crash, Beating NES Tetris
Blue Scuti and Fractal were racing against each other to crash the game.
Eventually, Blue Scuti crashed the game first, becoming the first person to beat NES Tetris.
If you are wondering why the game crash was overlooked by developers back in 1989, the short answer is that they thought it was impossible for players to make it past Level 29.
Level 29 was called the Killscreen by the Tetris community because it was impossible to move pieces left and right with the game’s autoshift movement, causing the players to eventually top out.
But then the Rolling Revolution happened, someone found a way to press the D-Pad quickly on the NES controller. That technique is called Rolling.
This broke the game, because players were able to advance far past Level 29. The developers intended Level 29 to be the end, so they never tested what would happen if players reached the further levels.
aGameScout’s video does a good job explaining how this all went down.
aGameScout’s Video Quickly Goes Viral
Blue Scuti’s Crash Run was phenomenal to say the least. YouTuber, aGameScout, has created amazing videos covering the Classic Tetris scene.
In April 2021, aGameScout released a video to describe the Revolutionary Rolling Technique. It only took 11 days for that video to get 1 Million views. Surprisingly, that video caught the attention of news media, such as Vice.
On December 31, 2023, aGameScout uploaded a video that covered Blue Scuti’s Crash Run, he originally titled it, “Is The Newest Classic Tetris World Record Unbeatable?”
The video was already getting about 9,000 views in the first 2 hours since upload.
Changing the Video Title
The video got the attention of Twitch streamer, SmallAnt. Besides bringing attention to the video, he gave some advice that helped. He asked his viewers to ask aGameScout to change the title to, “After 34 Years, Someone Finally Beat Tetris”. One of SmallAnt’s viewers brought this to aGameScout’s attention via a YouTube comment in the video.
aGameScout watched SmallAnt’s Twitch stream and liked the idea, so he took his advice.
The new title was a success, the views spiked even further.
On January 3, 2024, the video got 1 Million views. It only took 3 days for that to happen.
NES Tetris Gets Tons of Media Exposure
That same morning, news media started picking up the story.
Shockingly, the story was a segment on NBC’s Today Show and ABC’s Good Morning America. These are one of the 2 largest National Morning news programs in the United States.
Other Major News outlets picked up on the story such as BBC and the New York Times.
There will be much more news coverage as Blue Scuti and his family get bombarded with calls from the Press.
Blue Scuti will be at the 2024 CTWC Heart of Texas Regional. Here is the schedule of upcoming Classic Tetris Regional Tournaments.
He is expected to be at the 2024 Classic Tetris World Championship in Pasadena, California.
More players have crashed the game ever since.
Follow Blue Scuti on all of his social media accounts.
