American Teenager Becomes First Human to Beat Tetris

An American teenager from Oklahoma has become the first human player to beat Nintendo’s classic video game Tetris, thirty-four years after its release.

Willis Gibson posted a video on his YouTube channel of the moment he reached level 157, causing the game to crash. The thirteen-year-old fell back into his chair, declaring: “I’m going to pass out, I can’t feel my fingers.”

It only took him thirty-eight minutes to beat the game.

13 year old Willis Gibson aka Blue Scuti became the first recorded person to beat Tetris causing the game to freeze after reaching level 157 pic.twitter.com/uRt3KOasTh

— Jake Lucky (@JakeSucky) January 4, 2024

Until a few years ago, players believed it was only possible to play up to level 29.

Teenager made it to the “kill screen” playing Tetris

Technically, Willis—aka “blue scuti” in the gaming world—made it to what gamers call a “kill screen,” a point where the Tetris code glitches, causing the game to crash.

That might not sound like much of a victory to anyone thinking that only high scores count, the Associated Press (AP) reports, but it’s a highly coveted achievement in the world of video games, where records involve pushing hardware and software to their limits.

It’s also a very big deal for players of Tetris, which many had long considered unbeatable. That’s partly because the game doesn’t have a scripted ending; those four-block shapes just keep falling no matter how good you get at stacking them into disappearing rows.

Top players continued to find ways to extend their winning streaks by staying in the game to reach higher and higher levels, but in the end, the game beat them all.

The popular video game, which sees players arrange falling blocks into perfectly horizontal lines at increasing speeds, was created in 1984 by Soviet engineer Alexey Pajitnov and gained popularity after its debut on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Nintendo’s Game Boy handheld console in 1989.

Today, the game can be played across a range of consoles and platforms, including mobile phones.

Attempts to beat Tetris

In 2010, professional competitive gamer Thor Aackerlund reached level 30 by using a technique called hyper tapping, where a player vibrates their fingers in a way that moves the controller faster than the in-game speed.

This led to other gamers adopting hyper tapping and other techniques to see how far they could go, but as of last month, only AI had been able to reach the game’s true kill screen.

The teenager has played the game since he was eleven and has competed in several gaming tournaments. “When I started playing this game I never expected to ever crash the game, or beat it,” he communicated on his YouTube channel.

As well as beating the game, Willis says he also broke the overall score and three other Tetris world records. Other gamers are now trying to beat the thirteen-year-old’s records with many documenting their attempts on social media and video streaming websites.

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