Teenager Willis Gibson Beats Legacy Puzzle Game Tetris

13-year-old Tetris competitive player Willis Gibson from Oklahoma is the first human player to conquer the legacy puzzle game.

• 40-year-old Tetris is a timeless puzzle video game where players arrange tetrominoes to complete lines, clearing them from the screen.
• Dedicated to his late father, the YouTube video of him crashing the game has gone viral.

13-year-old Willis Gibson from Oklahoma has become the first human player to beat Tetris, reaching an unprecedented level of 157.

Created by a Russian Software engineer in 1985, Tetris is a puzzle video game in which players must complete lines by moving differently shaped pieces called tetrominoes (how cute!). Each completed line disappears once completed, making room for more shapes. The game is over when the uncleared lines reach the top. The more lines you clear, the higher your score becomes. Simple and straight to the point.

Ah! Good old Tetris!

This game has been so popular since its inception that it has become a cultural icon. Nintendo Game Boy, anyone? Every generation has had their version of Tetris. It’s like a rite of passage at this point.

I love puzzles but I must admit that I don’t get very far while playing this one.

Until 2011, players believed that the highest level you could reach was level 29. But modern problems require modern solutions. Thanks to the ingenuity of the players, advanced techniques like “hypertapping” and “rolling” expanded the game’s horizon. In 2021, an AI managed to reach level 236. That’s not impressive. But a human! Gibson is the first!

Anyway, back to the teenager. 13-year-old Gibson is actually a competitive Tetris player. I didn’t know that was a thing either. The kid even secured the third position at the 2023 World Championships. Can you imagine the hand-and-eye coordination needed to reach that? And they say video games are bad for you!

The sweetest thing about this is that the entire game was dedicated to his father whom he lost a couple of weeks before breaking the record. Who’s cutting onion?!

In his now-viral YouTube video under the screen name “Blue Scuti,” Gibson caused the game to crash after an intense 38-minute gameplay. His score read “999999” before the game crashed. Literally, the highest score anyone could ever get in Tetris!!

At some point during the gameplay, Gibson exclaimed, “I’m going to pass out, I can’t feel my fingers.” He employs the “rolling” technique which allows him to manipulate the directional pad at least 20 times per second to move blocks.

I know that in the grand scheme of things, this seems very mundane. But this is a 13-year-old boy who broke the record. The game itself is old enough at 40 years old to go golfing with Trump.

It takes a lot more than a button to reach this far. He’d need insane hand-and-eye coordination so he can place the tetrominoes (again, adorable) without looking at the pad. He’d also need quick wits to figure out on the fly where each piece can go so it doesn’t ruin the board. There are no powerups or clearing the board when you lose by watching an ad.

The game itself is frustrating sometimes as they give you the most awful pieces and you just have to deal with them. Hey! That sounds like Life!!

Anyway, Congratulations Willis for making the world’s childhood dream come true!

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