How a 13-year-old-boy became the first person to beat Tetris

Chances are, you’ve all played Tetris at some point in your lives, especially if you happen to have been born in the 1980s or 1990s. Yes, that classic puzzle game where a player has to rotate falling blocks of different shapes to slot together and create solid lines in a box.

However, the game has been believed to be unbeatable. Until now that is. 13-year-old Willis Gibson from Stillwater, Oklahoma, has reportedly become the first person to beat the game.

How Willis Gibson beat Tetris

On December 21, Willis Gibson hit a score of 999,999 in the game, having reached level 157. As he rotated and dropped a block for the single line on the screen to disappear, the game froze. This was of course, because the game runs on pretty much the same code as it initially did when it was launched in 1984, causing it to bug out and the game to stop after a certain point.

For the longest time, level 29 on Tetris was believed to be the end of the game, at which point the blocks began to fall simply too fast for a human being to react. Gibson therefore managed a feat previously only artificial intelligence has pulled off.

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

Tetris was first launched way back on June 6, 1984, and is turning 40 years old this year. The game was developed by Russian video game designer Alexey Pajitnov while working at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre under the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.

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Contrary to popular belief, Tetris is not the only seemingly endless game there is though. Popular arcade games for smartphones, including Subway Surfers and Temple Run happen to be some more examples of games that have no official end as such.