Boy, 13, becomes first documented player to beat Tetris

• On December 21st, 13-year-old Willis Gibson became the first player confirmed to have “beat” Tetris.
• Gibson, known online as “Blue Scooty,” reached level 157 of the 40-year-old Nintendo classic before a glitch in the game's code caused it to crash.
• Tetris CEO Maya Rogers said of Gibson in a statement: “Congratulations to 'Blue Squitty' on this extraordinary feat, which defies all conventional boundaries for this legendary game. I want to.''

The block-dropping video game “Tetris” was played by 13-year-old Willis Gibson. Gibson became the first player to officially “beat” the original Nintendo version of the game.

Technically, Willis (also known as “Blue Scutie” in the gaming world) has reached what gamers call a “kill screen,” a point where a glitch in the Tetris code causes the game to crash. This may not sound like much of a victory to those who think only high scores matter, but the video requires pushing hardware and software to its limits to achieve records. In the gaming world, this is a highly coveted achievement. onwards.

It's also a huge problem for Tetris players, who many have long considered invincible. One reason for this is that the game doesn't have a scripted ending. Those four block shapes of his just keep falling, no matter how good you get at piling them up into disappearing columns. Top players continued to stay in the game and look for ways to extend their winning streaks to reach higher levels, but eventually the game defeated them all.

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That is, until Willis was able to successfully trigger a kill screen at level 157 on December 21st, and the gaming world considered this a victory for the game, something that was almost beyond the limits of the software. was.

The creator of Tetris agrees. Tetris CEO Maya Rogers said in a statement: “Congratulations to Blue Squitty on this extraordinary feat, which defies all conventional boundaries for this legendary game.” Stated. Rogers called Willis' win a “monumental achievement,” noting that Tetris is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.

It was a very long journey. In the early days, “people in the Tetris world didn't even know how to get to these high levels,” said gaming YouTuber David McDonald, who has been documenting the gaming industry for years. “They were stuck in the 20s and 30s because they didn't know the techniques to go any further.” At level 29, blocks started falling faster than the in-game controller could react. This posed a particularly difficult obstacle.

Ultimately, the players found a way to progress, as McDonald documented in a detailed video of Willis' victory. In 2011, he reached level 30 using a technique called “hypertapping.” This technique allowed the player to rhythmically vibrate his fingers and move his game controller faster than the game's built-in speed. This technique allowed players to reach level 35 by his 2018, but then hit a wall.

The next big thing happened in 2020. This is when gamers combined multi-finger technology, originally used in arcade video games, with the technique of pressing a finger placed at the bottom of a controller against another finger at the top. This much faster approach, called “rolling”, allowed one player to reach level 95 in 2022.

Then another obstacle arose. The developers of the original Tetris didn't expect players to push the game's limits so aggressively, so strange quirks began to appear at higher levels. The color of the game caused him one particularly difficult problem with his palette. Color palettes traditionally cycle through 10 easily distinguishable patterns. However, starting at level 138, random color combinations started appearing, some of which made it much harder to distinguish the blocks from the game's black background.

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Two particularly diabolical patterns, one a dusky combination of dark blue and green later called “Dusk,” and the other consisting of blocks of black, gray, and white called “Charcoal,” are of interest to players. It turned out to be a burden. Match times were sometimes over 40 minutes for him, which, combined with increasingly long workloads, slowed progress once again. A Tetris-playing AI program called StackRabbit can help break this logjam by understanding exactly where players are likely to run into glitches that cause kill screens, ultimately helping them win the game. It was necessary.

StackRabbit, which managed to reach level 237 before the game crashed, was running on a modified version of Tetris, so its achievements cannot be strictly compared to those of human players. And that discovery could not immediately be applied to games played by humans. However, the results clearly show that game-ending glitches can be triggered by very specific events, such as which block pieces were in play or how many lines the player cleared at once. I did.

This allows the human player to take over the task of mapping out all the scenarios that could cause such a crash in the original game. These usually happened because his 10 year old code in the game got misplaced and started reading the next instruction from the wrong place, generally resulting in garbage input. A large-scale effort inspired by StackRabbit's experience ultimately produced a large spreadsheet detailing which game levels and which specific situations are most likely to lead to crashes.

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That's what prompted Willis to attempt the record. Still, even he seemed shocked when he crashed the game at level 157. In his livestream video, he appeared to be hyperventilating, barely gasping “Oh my God” several times, clutching his temples, and fearing he was going to pass out. After putting his hand over his mouth, apparently trying to steady his breathing, he finally exclaimed, “I can't feel my fingers.”