Justin Yu

Fractal161
Yu after winning the 2023 Classic Tetris World Championship
Personal information
Name	Justin Yu
Born	2000 or 2001 (age 22–23)[a]
Career information
Games	Classic Tetris
Playing career	c. 2016–present
Career highlights and awards
CTWC champion (2023) CTWC runner-up (2022)

Justin Yu, known online as fractal161, is an American Classic Tetris player from Dallas, Texas. While also a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, Yu has competed in several competitive Tetris tournaments, most notably winning the 2023 Classic Tetris World Championship. 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.

Personal life and education

Yu is from Dallas, Texas.^[2][3] In high school, Yu participated in a number of math competitions,^[3] helping him to get accepted into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, with a major in computer science and engineering.^[2] As part of the class of 2025, Yu is working towards another major in mathematics, with a minor in music technology.^[2][3] 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 has stated the Video Game Orchestra and other school commitments are still placed before practicing Tetris.^[3]

Tetris career

Yu began to play the 1985 puzzle video game Tetris in about 2016, becoming interested after watching videos of the game on YouTube, but never playing for more than an hour at a time.^[2] He began to pursue the game more competitively in about 2019, starting to play in three to four hour sessions, where he often practiced on optimized his strategy.^[2][3] 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]

As a Junior at MIT, Yu competed in the 2023 Classic Tetris World Championship from October 13 to 15, 2023, where he beat fellow competitor Eve Commandeur ("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][4] Fellow competitive Tetris player and YouTuber Willis Gibson ("Blue Scuti") became inspired by the goal, and would beat Yu to the achievement on December 21, 2023.^[3][5] Yu celebrated the achievement with Gibson, exclaiming "He did it, he did it!" on his livestream.^[6][7] 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.^[4][8][9] In early 2024, Yu hosted his own Tetris event at MIT, which through word of mouth had about 50 to 60 attendees.^[3] From June 8–9, Yu competed in the 2024 Classic Tetris World Championship, where he was eliminated in the Round of 16 by Tristan Kwai ("Tristop") who went on to win 3rd place.^[10][11] Yu has stated his future goal is to one day help run Tetris websites and tournaments as opposed to competing in them, believing its a large effort often going unnoticed he would like to help in.^[2][3]

Playing style

After becoming a competitive player, Yu was among the first to change their playing style to the rolling technique, which involves rolling the back of the controller with all five fingers to position the game pieces more quickly, which became crucial to beating later levels.^[2] In a February 2024 interview with the newspaper The Tech, Yu stated his strategy revolved less around making "the board look as nice as possible", and trying to focus completing tetrises, or when the maximum amount of four rows are cleared at once in-game, providing the player a large amount of points.^[3]

Competitive record

Notelist

References