Game Master? 13-Year-Old Believed To Be First To ‘Beat’ Tetris

In the nearly four decades of Tetris’ existence, no person had ever “beat” the game, until a 13-year-old did it last month.

So Willis Gibson on Dec. 21 was in utter disbelief while sitting in an office chair in his bedroom in Stillwater, Okla. His screen froze, and he achieved a Tetris score of 999999.

“Oh, my god,” Willis said to himself in a video he uploaded to YouTube on Tuesday. “I can’t feel my fingers.”

Willis became the first person to advance so far in the original Nintendo version of the puzzle game Tetris that the game froze, achieving a feat previously credited only to artificial intelligence, per the New York Times.

Tetris was released on the original Nintendo Entertainment System in 1989, and the game theoretically can be played forever if the player is good enough and has enough disposable time on their hands. The limit was thought to be Level 29 when the blocks start falling quickly for a normal human.

Gibson, who has played Tetris competitively since 2021 under the name Blue Scuti, reached Level 157, reaching Tetris’ “kill screen,” the point where a video game becomes unplayable because of limitations in its coding. His screen read he had made it to Level 18 because the code wasn’t designed to advance so high.

Gamers previously “beat” Tetris by hacking into the game’s software, but Gibson is thought to be the first to do it on the original hardware.

“It’s never been done by a human before,” president of the Classic Tetris World Championship Vince Clemente said, per the New York Times. “It’s basically something that everyone thought was impossible until a couple of years ago.”

Gibson admitted he was “just extremely excited” over his feat and revealed his goal is to win the Classic Tetris World Championship. He placed third overall in October and has made $3,000 from playing in Tetris tournaments.