Block Buster! 13 Years Old Cracks Tetris Code, Becomes First Ever Conqueror

When Soviet engineer Alexey developed the game in 1984, he didn’t program an ending. But, in 2021, it was discovered that if a player reached a high enough level, it would crash the game.

Reaching on highest enough level had only been achieved by an AI program — until now.

Willis Gibson a teenager made history! He posted a video to his YouTube channel on Monday showing his history-making game of Tetris. For a total of 38 straight minutes, he arranged falling Tetris blocks into horizontal lines as the game’s speed increased.

When the boy reached level 157, a feat once thought impossible, the game glitched and crashed. No more blocks came down and he had reached the kill screen, effectively beating the game.

“Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. Yes!” Gibson, shouted surprisingly holding his head in his hands. “I’m going to pass out. I can’t feel my fingers. I can’t feel my hands.”

Gibson on his YouTube channel goes by the name Blue Scuti. In the YouTube description of his video, he wrote: “When I started playing this game I never expected to ever crash the game, or beat it.”

He says that his run also broke world records for overall score, level, and lines completed. However, Nintendo has not publicly commented about the boy’s feat. Willis has previously participated in a lot of gaming tournaments and placed third at the 2023 Classic Tetris World Championship.

But the big question is how did he really crack the Tetris code. And why did it take this long for any of us to beat Tetris? If you ever played Tetris, then you definitely know the goal of the game, and in case you don’t, the goal of Tetris is to keep the blocks from piling up. 

Players can rotate the blocks and position the blocks to form solid lines, at which point those rows are cleared away. Unsurprising, it is among the most played and celebrated video games ever.

Theoretically, it was believed that the game could go endlessly if a player was good enough. Although,  for years, the limit was thought to be Level 29, when the blocks start falling faster it seems as if it would be impossible for a human to keep up. But in the last decade, a new generation of Tetris players has crossed those boundaries.

Gibson from Stillwater, Okla, got to Level 157, reaching a point where the game becomes unplayable because of limitations in its coding. (In the video, when the game freezes, on screen it appears Willis has made it to Level 18. That’s because the code wasn’t developed to advance so high.)

Source: Game Informer

Willis has played Tetris competitively since 2021 and said in an interview on Tuesday that he was “just extremely excited.” His Tetris game journey started when he came across YouTube videos of the game, and he began gathering the stuff necessary to play an old version of it.

He further said he was attracted to the game because of its “simplicity.”

“It’s easy to start yet it’s really hard to master it,” he said in the interview. It appears that even record-breakers have to do their chores; Willis had just finished emptying the dishwasher when he received a call from a New York Times reporter, said his mother, Karin Cox, 39.

Willis’s mother, Karin bought her son a version of a Nintendo console called a RetroN, which used the same hardware as the original Nintendo console, from a pawnshop, as well as an old cathode-ray tube television to help him get started his game journey. 

You’ll be surprised to know that in a given week, Gibson plays about 20 hours of Tetris. But, Ms. Cox, who is a high school math teacher said that she is actually OK with it, adding “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.’”

For your information, there’ve been many gamers who have beaten Tetris by hacking into the game’s software, but Willis, who last year became one of the country’s top Tetris players, is the first to do it on the original hardware.

On Willis’s victory, Vince Clemente, the president of the Classic Tetris World Championship, said “It’s never been done by a human before,” adding, “It’s basically something that everyone thought was impossible until a couple of years ago.”

It’s totally different from how we see Tetris in our normal lives vs the competitive world’s Tetris, where the goal is generally to outscore your opponents rather than to outlast them. “Trying for the crash” is a totally different approach. 

“The main strategy is just playing as safe as you can,” Willis said in an interview. 

A video game content creator and competitive Tetris player David Macdonald, who goes by the name of aGameScout, said It’s a bit more complicated than that. In the last few years, top players have begun using the “rolling technique,” which is a quick tapping method using several fingers instead of just one or two. 

This particular technique has changed what is possible in competitive Tetris. More top players are solely focusing on “going for the crash,” instead of accumulating as many points as possible before being defeated by the game.

And now Willis Gibson has raised the bar.

This Tetris prodigy has just come up and just completely taken over the pro-Tetris scene,” Macdonald added.

The 13-year-old champ has already won several regional tournaments, and his goal is to win the Classic Tetris World Championship, in which he placed third overall in October. Willis’s next tournament is at the end of the month in Texas. Till now, he has made more than $3,000 from playing in Tetris tournaments.

But, crashing the Tetris code is the next level achievement for him that will absolutely open new frontiers for Tetris players to explore. 

For instance, Willis triggered the freeze by clearing a single row of blocks. A double-row clear may not have frozen the game, Macdonald said. The game was never thought to go that long, he continued, and no one had ever reached a trigger point like that.

“Now that it’s been done, there’s kind of a new phase or a new challenge,” Macdonald said to the reporter. “When we all found out this past year that, ‘Oh, the crash is possible, you could do it at this level,’ then people started racing to be the first to do it. But now there’s a whole new challenge, which is basically now, instead of going through the crash, how long can you go beyond the crash?”

He ended by saying, as far as Willis goes, don’t expect to see him playing a PlayStation 5 anytime soon. “I don’t really like newer games as much as the older games.”

In my opinion, Willis Gipson isn't just a 13-year-old who beat Tetris; he's a symbol of what's possible when talent meets dedication. 

His unwavering focus is truly inspiring, and it's exciting to think about what other gaming heights he might reach. What do you think this achievement means for the future of Tetris? Could we see other players pushing the boundaries like Gipson? 

Frequently Asked Questions 

Q. Who has beaten Tetris?

A 13-year-old Wills Gibson became the first person to officially beat Tetris in January 2024. He reached a level where the game's internal code couldn't handle it anymore, resulting in a crash. This was achieved on the classic NES version of Tetris.

Q. Is it possible to beat Tetris?

While the original Tetris designed by Alexey Pajitnov was not intended to be "beaten" and was designed to be an endless game with increasing difficulty, in 2024, a 13-year-old named Willis Gibson managed to reach a level (Level 29) where the game's internal code could no longer handle it, causing a crash. This is often referred to as the "kill screen" or "true ending." So yes, now we can say that it’s possible to beat Tetris. 

Q. Why is Tetris so famous?

There are many reasons why Tetris is so famous, but the biggest one is the simplicity of this game. The player just has to rotate and fit falling blocks to clear lines, this makes it easy to pick up and pay for people of all ages and skill levels. 

Q. When did Russia invent Tetris?

The Tetris game was invented by Russian designer Alexey Pajitnov and released on the original Nintendo Entertainment System in 1989. The game allows players to rotate falling blocks strategically to clear levels.

Q. What is the highest-selling game of all time?

According to Wikipedia, as of  October 26, 2023, Minecraft is the highest-selling video game of all time, with over 300 million copies sold across all platforms (PC, mobile, and consoles).

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