A 13-Year-Old Just Became The First Person To Beat Tetris

Normally, Tetris isn’t really a game anyone “beats,” typically you just play it until it gets too fast, lines stack up, and you fail. But the NES version of Tetris does technically have an end, in a weird way, and up until last month, it was thought to be impossible for a human to achieve. Then, a 13-year-old did just that.

But first, a little bit of background. Tetris on the NES is, as most NES games were, a little bit buggy. After a certain point, the speed becomes way too much for most humans to handle, and the screen becomes very glitchy. That hasn’t stopped speedrunners and top-tier players who, for the last decade or so, have been racing to get to what’s known as the kill screen — the point where the game becomes so buggy that it crashes.

It’s been known for a while that this is possible, with tool-assisted runs and AI players proving that it can be done, but it requires up to 20 inputs a second to actually achieve – and takes up to 40 minutes at that high level to get there – so many thought humans wouldn’t be able to do it.

Players eventually figured out a method though called rolling, which has them holding one of the directional buttons and rolling the controller ever so slightly to have the button pressed within a few milliseconds of movement, allowing rapid inputs After that, it was just a matter of time before somebody achieved the impossible.

And that person was Blue Scuti, also known as Willis Gibson, who achieved the maximum score of a million very quickly, and kept playing until the game crashed at level 157. Gibson’s reaction to the victory is fantastic, and watching him play is absolutely mesmerizing.

In an interview with Classic Tetris, Gibson said that “if you set your mind to something and you put work into it, it’s likely you will get it if you try hard enough,” and dedicated the victory to his father, who passed away somewhat recently.