On December 21, 2023, 13-year-old Willis Gibson leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head, in his room in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and could hardly believe what he had just accomplished.
The screen in front of him stood still, displaying the Tetris score of “999999”.
“Oh my God!” Willis repeatedly exclaimed in the video he posted on YouTube on January 2. “I can’t feel anything in my fingertips anymore,” he said.
Willis has just become the first person to beat the Tetris game on Nintendo, a record that previously belonged only to artificial intelligence.
13-year-old Willis Gibson becomes famous after breaking the Tetris record. (Photo: NYT).
Designed by software engineer Alexey Pajitnov and released on the Nintendo entertainment system for the first time in 1989, Tetris is a game of stacking different shapes. The objective of the game is to prevent the blocks from piling up to the top of the screen. Players can rotate the blocks and arrange them quickly enough to create straight lines. It is one of the longest-lasting games.
Theoretically, the game can last indefinitely if the player is skilled enough. However, for many years, the maximum limit was Level 29, when the falling blocks descend so quickly that an average person doesn’t have enough time to respond. Yet, over the past decade, a new generation of players has sought to break that barrier.
Willis managed to play up to Level 157, reaching the “kill screen”, which is when the game becomes unplayable due to coding limits.
Willis has been playing Tetris since 2021 under the nickname Blue Scuti. He stated that he enjoys the game for its “simplicity.”
“It’s easy to start, but very hard to master,” he mentioned in an interview with the New York Times.
Over the decades, some gamers have “defeated” Tetris by hacking the game’s software. However, Willis is believed to be the first person to truly achieve this on the original hardware.
“Previously, no one had ever done this. It was thought to be impossible until a few years ago,” stated Vince Clemente, president of the Classic Tetris World Championship.
