13-year-old boy becomes the first person to win Tetris

Willis Gibson was stunned, on the verge of tears, when he saw this. the screen froze and his score showed “999999”.. He is 13 years old, lives in Oklahoma, USA, and recently became the first person to win the iconic video game Tetris.

“I’m going to faint… I can’t feel my fingers,” he can be heard saying in a video of the feat. In theory, a game of Tetris can continue indefinitely if the player is good enough. But Willis reached the “screen of death”, overcoming the functional limitations of a video game, after playing 40 minutes and 1511 lines.

The boy reached level 157. When he reached the end, the game announced that Willis had reached level 18. He reported an error indicating that the system was not configured to achieve this level. 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 accumulating. Players can rotate blocks and place them so that they form solid lines. This way they eliminate rows. For 30 years, every game ended the same way: “Game over.”

“The man has never done this before,” said Vince Clemente, president of the Classic Tetris World Championship. “This is essentially something that everyone thought was impossible just a couple of years ago,” Clemente added. So far, only one artificial intelligence has managed to win the game. In 2021, programmer Greg Cannon used StackRabbit software to play the perfect Tetris game.

Years of training to beat Tetris

For many years, it was believed that the limit of Tetris was level 29, when blocks start falling so fast that it seems impossible to keep up with them. However, in the last decade, a new generation of players has begun to break this ceiling. They have developed different techniques that even take into account different ways of pressing controls.

“Easy to start, but very difficult to master” Willis said The newspaper “New York Times. “The main strategy is to just play as safe as possible.” But the boy is not a newbie at all.

Willis has been playing Tetris competitively since 2021. called Blue Scuti. He became interested in video games when he found some games on YouTube. Then his mother bought him an old version of the Nintendo console. What do you like most?: its “simplicity”. Willis placed third at the most recent Classic Tetris World Championships held in Portland, Oregon in October 2023.

Willis said the biggest challenge was controlling his nerves, which were already on edge after the first 30 minutes of the game. As you progress through the levels, the system begins to malfunction. For example, around level 138, a byte overflow error causes the game to start reading unwanted areas of memory, such as color palette data. Because of this, the pieces momentarily become faded and almost invisible.

Other players managed to beat Tetris, but by piracy of the game’s 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 original hardware. In another interview, the boy said that his record is dedicated to his father, who died in December.