Thirteen-year-old gamer becomes 1st to beat the ‘unbeatable’ Tetris by breaking it
Thirteen-year-old player named Willis Gibson became the first player to officially beat the original Nintendo version of the game. The falling-block video game Tetris has met its match in 13-year-old Willis Gibson, who has become the first player to officially beat the original Nintendo version of the game — by breaking it.
Technically, Willis — aka blue scuti in the gaming world — made it to what gamers call a kill screen, a point where the Tetris code glitches, crashing the game. That might not sound like much of a victory to anyone thinking that only high scores count, but it’s a highly coveted achievement in the world of video games, where records involve pushing hardware and software to their limits. And beyond.
It’s also a very big deal for players of Tetris, which many had long considered unbeatable. That’s partly because the game doesn’t have a scripted ending; those four-block shapes just keep falling no matter how good you get at stacking them into disappearing rows. Top players continued to find ways to extend their winning streaks by staying in the game to reach higher and higher levels, but in the end, the game beat them all.
Until, that is, Willis managed on Dec. 21, 2023, to trigger a kill screen on Level 157, which the gaming world takes as a victory over the game — something along the lines of pushing the software past its own limits.
Congratulations to ‘blue scuti’ for achieving this extraordinary accomplishment, a feat that defies all preconceived limits of this legendary game, Tetris CEO Maya Rogers said in a statement. Rogers noted that Tetris will celebrate its 40th anniversary this year and called Willis’ victory a monumental achievement.
Early on, the Tetris scene people didn’t even know how to get to these higher levels, said David Macdonald, a gaming YouTuber who has chronicled the gaming industry for years. They were just stuck in the 20s and 30s because they just didn’t know techniques to get any further. Level 29 posed an especially tough roadblock because the blocks began falling more quickly than the in-game controller could respond.
Eventually, players found ways to make progress, as Macdonald chronicled in his detailed video on Willis’ victory. In 2011, one got to Level 30 using a technique called hypertapping, where a player could rhythmically vibrate their fingers to move the game controller faster than the game’s built-in speed. That technique took players to level 35 by 2018, after which they hit a wall.
The next breakthrough came in 2020 when a gamer combined a multifinger technique originally used on arcade video games with a finger positioned on the bottom of the controller to push it against another finger on the top. Called rolling, this much speedier approach helped one player reach Level 95 in 2022.
Because the original Tetris developers had never counted on players pushing the game’s limits so aggressively, bizarre quirks began to crop up at higher levels. One particularly difficult issue arose with the game’s color palette, which traditionally cycled through 10 easily distinguished patterns. Starting at level 138, though, random color combinations began to appear — some of which made it much harder to distinguish the blocks from the game’s black background.
Two particularly devilish patterns — one a dim combination of dark blues and greens later dubbed Dusk, the other composed of black, gray, and white blocks called Charcoal — proved taxing for players. When combined with the strain of increasingly longer games, which could run 40 minutes or more, progress slowed again. It took a Tetris-playing AI program to break that logjam by helping map out just where players might happen across a glitch resulting in a kill screen, and finally beat the game.
After compiling a large spreadsheet detailing the most likely crash-inducing scenarios, Willis embarked on his record-breaking run. When he crashed the game at Level 157, even he appeared shocked. In his livestream video, he appears to hyperventilate before barely gasping Oh my God several times, clutching his temples and worrying that he might be passing out. After cupping his hands over his mouth in an apparent attempt to regulate his breathing, he finally exclaims, I can’t feel my fingers.
Willis’ achievement demonstrates the indomitable spirit of gamers and the ever-evolving landscape of video games. As Tetris celebrates its 40th anniversary, this triumphant victory shows that even the unbeatable can be conquered with skill, determination, and a touch of luck.
