Willis Gibson, a 13-year-old who lives in Oklahoma, is reportedly the first person ever to beat Tetris, the classic puzzle video game that was introduced in 1985 by Alexey Pajitnov, a Soviet software engineer.
Gibson, who goes by the name “Blue Scuti” on his YouTube channel, shared the accomplishment in a new video that was published this week, where he can be seen reaching a high score of 999,999 following a few minutes of gameplay before reaching the “kill screen” at around the 38-minute mark, getting to level 157 and effectively beating the game.
“Oh my God! Yes! I’m going to pass out. I can’t feel my hands,” Gibson said when he realized what he’d accomplished.
“Previously, only bots powered by artificial intelligence had forced the game, first released on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), to its ‘kill screen’, where its signature blocks are falling so fast that the game itself can’t continue,” The Guardian noted in its coverage.
“It’s never been done by a human before. It’s basically something that everyone thought was impossible until a couple of years ago,” Vince Clemente, the president of the Classic Tetris World Championship, told the New York Times in a separate report.
The Times noted that gamers in the past have beaten Tetris by hacking into the game’s software, but Gibson is believed to be the first to do it on original hardware.
“I’m actually OK with it,” Karin Cox, Gibson’s mother, said. “He does other things outside of playing Tetris, so it really wasn’t that terribly difficult to say OK. It was harder to find an old CRT TV than it was to say, ‘Yeah, we can do this for a little bit.’”
“I don’t really like newer games as much as the older games,” Willis said.