A 13-year-old boy from Oklahoma has become the first person to "beat" Tetris, a game that was released 40 years ago after he crashed the video game by reaching level 157.
The young boy, identified as Willis Gibson, appears to be the first gamer to reach the supposed final level of the classic video game. In a video uploaded to YouTube on Tuesday, he said that he felt like he was going to pass out as he could no longer feel his fingers after playing the game for so long.
Oklahoma Teenager Beats Tetris
In the description of the video that he uploaded, Gibson said that when he started playing Tetris, he was never expecting to crash the game or even beat it. The viral footage of the gamer's 38-minute run, which was posted under his "Blue Scuti" screen name, is the latest major development for the game that was created by a Soviet engineer in 1984.
Since its release, the game has had more than 200 official variants that have gone public on at least 70 systems, which is a world record according to Guinness World Records. Electronic Arts also developed a mobile version of the game that was released in 2006 and has been sold 100 million times, as per CNN.
The sales put that particular version of Tetris as the third best-selling video game of all time. The creator of the video game himself was instantly hooked after he finished it. In an interview in 2019, Alexey Pajitnov said that he could not stop himself from playing his prototype version of Tetris because it was very addictive to put the shapes together.
After Pajitnov created Tetris, it quickly spread and its staying power was so strong that its Cold War-era inception was turned into a movie in March last year. A gaming expert, Victor Lucas said that the game hooked them in almost like a "primitive state."
Lucas, who is behind the television series Electric Playground, noted that Tetris transcends video games, similar to checkers or chess. He added that it was one of these Juggernaut play experiences that any person can immediately understand.
Impossible Achievement
Gibson's feat of advancing so far in the video game that it was forced to freeze was something that was previously only possible by artificial intelligence. The game's premise is simple, it features relentless arrays of shapes that float down the player's screen, according to the New York Times.
The main objective of the player is to keep the blocks from piling up to the top of the screen, which would result in a game over. Players can rotate the shapes and position them to form solid lines, which would remove the rows from the screen. Tetris is one of the most enduring and celebrated video games in history.
Gibson's achievement is major not only for him but for other players and lovers of Tetris who have long considered it to be unbeatable by humans. This is because the game continues to drop shapes no matter how good players get at stacking them into disappearing rows.
Top players have found ways to extend their winning streak and reach higher and higher levels but ultimately failed to reach the final level, said the New York Times.
