Fractal161 | |
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Personal information | |
Name | Justin Yu |
Born | 2000or2001(age 22–23) [lower-alpha 1] |
Career information | |
Games | Classic Tetris |
Playing career | c. 2016–present |
Career highlights and awards | |
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Justin Yu, known online as fractal161, is an American student and Tetris player from Texas. While also a student at MIT, Yu has competed in several competitive Tetris tournaments, and is the current Classic Tetris World Champion. On January 3, 2024, Yu became the second person to "beat" the game and first person to achieve the earliest possible game crash on level 155.
Yu is from Dallas, Texas. [2] He is currently a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, with a computer science and engineering major. [2] As of 2023 [update] , Yu was working towards another major in mathematics with a minor in music technology. Yu also plays the cello in the MIT Video Game Orchestra, an orchestra at the school which performs covers of classic video game music. [2]
Yu began to play the 1985 puzzle video game Tetris in about 2016, becoming interested after watching videos of the game on YouTube. [2] He soon began to play the game more often and practiced on correcting his weaknesses. [2] To get a better understanding of the game, Yu began experimenting in programming assembly and ROM hacking, which consequently helped him in his education and to become the first person to reach Tetris's late-game glitched color levels. [2] After becoming a competitive player, Yu was among the first to change their playing style to the rolling technique, a faster way of playing the game which became crucial to beating later levels. [2]
As a Junior in MIT, Yu competed in the 2023 Classic Tetris World Championship from October 13 to 15, 2023, where he beat fellow competitor Sidney Commandeur (known online as "Sidnev") and placed first, winning over US$3,000. [1] [2]
After the 2023 CTWC, Yu announced his intentions to try to "beat the game" by reaching its "killscreen," a point late in the game when the code glitches, resulting in a game crash due to hardware limitations within the NES. [2] [3] Fellow competitive Tetris player and YouTuber Willis Gibson (known online as "Blue Scuti") became inspired by the goal, and would beat Yu to the achievement on December 21, 2023. [4] Yu celebrated the achievement with Gibson, exclaiming "He did it, he did it!" on his livestream. [5] [6] On another livestream on January 3, 2024, Yu beat the game, becoming the second person to do so after Gibson and first person to achieve the earliest possible game crash on level 155, two levels quicker than on Gibson's run. [3] [7] [8] Yu has stated his future goal is to one day help run Tetris websites and tournaments as opposed to competing in them. [2]
Year | Championship | Score | Finishing place | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|
2020 | CTM April Challengers Circuit | 2–3 | 2nd | [9] |
CTM August Futures Circuit | 3–1 | 1st | [10] | |
2021 | CTM April Challengers Circuit | 2–2 | 2nd | [9] |
CTM June Challengers Circuit | 3–0 | 1st | [9] | |
CTM August Masters Event | 3–1 | [11] | ||
Classic Tetris World Championship | 3–2 | 14th | [12] | |
2022 | CTM April Masters Event | 3–2 | 1st | [13] |
CTM July Masters Event | 3–1 | [14] | ||
CTM August Masters Event | 3–0 | [15] | ||
Classic Tetris World Championship | 1-3 | 2nd | [12] | |
2023 | CTM PAL June Tier 1 | 3–3 | [16] | |
Classic Tetris World Championship | 3-2 | 1st | [1] | |
2024 | CTM January Masters Event | 3-1 | 1st | [17] |
CTM February Masters Event | 3-0 | 1st | [18] | |
CTM Mega Masters 2024 | 3-2 | 1st | [19] |
Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov is a Russian computer engineer and video game designer who is best known for creating, designing, and developing Tetris in 1985 while working at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre under the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. After Tetris was released internationally in 1987, he released a sequel in 1989, entitled Welltris.
Tetris is a puzzle video game created in 1985 by Alexey Pajitnov, a Soviet software engineer. It has been published by several companies for multiple platforms, most prominently during a dispute over the appropriation of the rights in the late 1980s. After a significant period of publication by Nintendo, in 1996 the rights reverted to Pajitnov, who co-founded the Tetris Company with Henk Rogers to manage licensing.
Dr. Mario is a 1990 puzzle video game developed and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Entertainment System, Famicom, and Game Boy. It was produced by Gunpei Yokoi and designed by Takahiro Harada. The soundtrack was composed by Hirokazu Tanaka.
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Speedrunning is the act of playing a video game, or section of a video game, with the goal of completing it as fast as possible. Speedrunning often involves following planned routes, which may incorporate sequence breaking and can exploit glitches that allow sections to be skipped or completed more quickly than intended. Tool-assisted speedrunning (TAS) is a subcategory of speedrunning that uses emulation software to slow the game down and create a precisely controlled sequence of inputs.
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The Minus World is a glitched level found in the 1985 video game Super Mario Bros. It can be encountered by maneuvering the protagonist, Mario, in a particular way to trick the game into sending him to the wrong area. Players who enter this area are greeted with an endless, looping water level in the original Famicom/NES cartridge versions, while the version released for the Famicom Disk System sends them to a sequence of three different levels; this difference is due to the data being arranged in different ways between the two versions. It gained exposure in part thanks to the magazine Nintendo Power discussing how the glitch is encountered. Super Mario Bros. creator Shigeru Miyamoto denied that the addition of the Minus World was intentional, though he later commented that the fact that it does not crash the game could make it count as a game feature.
I Wanna Be the Guy: The Movie: The Game, commonly called I Wanna Be the Guy and abbreviated to IWBTG , is a freeware platform game created by Michael "Kayin" O'Reilly for Microsoft Windows using Multimedia Fusion 2. First released on October 5, 2007, the game is no longer in active development, though the game's source code was released by Kayin in 2011 and a remastered edition was released in 2020. IWBTG has unusually difficult platforming elements, unorthodox level design, and uses sound effects, characters, and music from many other games.
Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters is a 2011 American documentary film that follows the lives of several gamers from around the country as they prepare to compete in the 2010 Classic Tetris World Championship held in Los Angeles, California. It recounts the development and rise of Tetris as one of the most-played video games of all time, the role it has played in shaping the lives of the gamers it chronicles, the mystery surrounding the whereabouts of former Nintendo World Champion Thor Aackerlund, and the conception and execution of the first-ever Classic Tetris World Championship by gaming enthusiast Robin Mihara.
Tetris 2, known in Japan as Tetris Flash, is a puzzle video game developed by Nintendo and Tose and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was ported to the Game Boy in 1993 and Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1994 by Bullet Proof Software.
The Classic Tetris World Championship (CTWC) is a video game competition series, hosted by the Socal Gaming Expo. The competition launched in 2010, during the filming of Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters to determine the world's greatest Tetris player. Since 2021, the champion of each tournament has received the Jonas Neubauer Memorial Trophy, named after the seven-time record setting champion who died in 2021. In its first two years, the competition was held in Los Angeles, California, but was moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2012, and was held there annually through 2023. The 2024 edition will be held in Pasadena, California.
Jonas Neubauer was an American Tetris player, seven-time champion at the Classic Tetris World Championship, Twitch streamer, and a taproom manager. Neubauer is widely considered to be one of the greatest Tetris players of all time.
Tetris, also known as classic Tetris, is a puzzle video game for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) released in 1989, based on Tetris (1985) by Alexey Pajitnov. It was published after a legal battle between Nintendo and Atari Games, who had already released a Tetris NES port under a license that was found to be invalid. Bullet-Proof Software had previously published Tetris for the Family Computer in December 1988, while Nintendo had published Tetris for the Game Boy earlier in 1989.
Willis Gibson, also known online as Blue Scuti, is an American classic Tetris player from Stillwater, Oklahoma. He is best known for becoming the first person to "beat" the game on December 21, 2023, after he triggered a killscreen on the previously-unreached level 157, crashing the game.
Michael Khanh Artiaga, known online as DogplayingTetris or simply Dog, is an American Tetris player from Texas. He is best known for back-to-back victories in the 2020 and 2021 Classic Tetris World Championships (CTWC), the former of which led him to set the Guinness World Record for the "Youngest Tetris World Champion" at 13 years old.
Andrew Artiaga, known online as P1xelAndy, is an American Tetris player from Texas. Competitively, Artiaga has placed second in the 2020 Classic Tetris World Championships (CTWC) and third in the 2022 CTWC. On January 4, 2024, Artiaga also became the third person to ever "beat" the game, only days after his competitors did so for the first time.