Willis Gibson was stunned, on the verge of tears, when he saw that the screen had frozen and his score showed “999999”. He is 13 years old, lives in Oklahoma, United States, and recently became the first human being to beat the iconic video game Tetris.
“I’m going to faint… I can’t feel my fingers,” he is heard in the video that recorded the feat. Theoretically, Tetris can continue indefinitely if a player is good enough. But Willis reached the “screen of death”, collapsing the functional limit of the video game, after a game of 40 minutes and 1,511 lines.
The boy had reached level 157. When he reached the end, the game said that Willis had reached level 18. An error reflecting that the system was not configured to reach that high, reported The New York Times.
Tetris was invented by software engineer Alexey Pajitnov and released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1989. The goal of the game is to prevent blocks from piling up. Players can rotate the blocks and place them in such a way that they form solid lines. In this way, they eliminate rows. For 30 years, every game ended the same way: “Game Over.”
“It’s never been done by a human before,” said Vince Clemente, the president of the Classic Tetris World Championship. “Basically, it’s something that everyone thought was impossible until a couple of years ago,” Clemente added. Until now, only one artificial intelligence had managed to beat the game. In 2021, programmer Greg Cannon used software called StackRabbit to play a perfect Tetris.
Years of training to beat Tetris
For years it was thought that the limit of Tetris was level 29, when the blocks begin to fall so fast that it seems impossible to keep up. However, in the last decade, a new generation of players began to break down this ceiling. They developed different techniques, which even consider different ways of pressing the controls.
“It’s easy to get started, but really hard to master,” Willis said to the New York Times. “The main strategy is just to play as safe as possible.” But the boy is anything but a rookie.
Willis has been playing Tetris competitively since 2021 under the name Blue Scuti. He got hooked on the video game when he found some games on YouTube. Then, his mother bought him an old version of the Nintendo console. What do you like most?: the “simplicity” of it. Willis placed third at the last Classic Tetris World Championship, held in Portland, Oregon, in October 2023.
Willis said that the biggest challenge was controlling his nerves, which were already unleashed after the first 30 minutes of play. As the levels progress, the system begins to fail. For example, near level 138, a byte overflow error causes the game to start reading unwanted areas of memory, such as color palette data. This causes the pieces to become faint and almost invisible momentarily.
Other players managed to beat Tetris, but by pirating the game software. On December 19, Willis managed to break the record of level 153. And on December 21, he finally became the first to beat the game on the original hardware. The boy said in another interview that his record was dedicated to his father, who died in December.