Teens are rewriting what is possible in the world of competitive Tetris

polygon.com:

When the Classic Tetris World Championship (CTWC) debuted in 2010, the kill screen was the game’s final, unbeatable boss. Players pushed to get the highest score possible before level 29, at which point the game’s pieces started falling at double speed. It seemed humanly impossible to keep up with the falling shapes, which would pile up on players’ screens and spell death for their game.

But in the past four years, what once seemed an impossibility has become the norm in competitive classic Tetris. In the 1989 NES version of Tetris, which is still standard at competitive tournaments, players make it well into level 30 and beyond. This new generation of talent, made up of mostly teenagers, has not only breathed new life into a 30-year-old game, but also completely upended expectations of what’s possible within it.

From the beginning, competitive players of classic Tetris tried to push the game past what its developers imagined possible. The first frontier of competitive Tetris was the maxout, when the score was pushed past 999,999 and the game would no longer show an accurate score. Because playing in level 29 and beyond was out of the question, players aimed to break 1 million before the game would inevitably beat them. This meant maintaining “maxout pace” where players would complete enough “Tetrises” (when a player drops a straight I-block vertically, clearing four lines simultaneously and earning more points than single line clears) before the kill screen.

In 2010, players organized the first CTWC, largely in response to the world’s first indisputable maxout, accomplished by Harry Hong (other players like Thor Aackerlund and Jonas Neubauer claimed to have maxed out as well, but the proof wasn’t definitive). The