The 13-Year-Old Who Became the First Person to Ever Beat Tetris
Tetris has fallen.
A week into 2024, and we’re already making sports history.
Wait, sports history? I know what you’re thinking, but bear with me. Once you hear about 13-year-old’s Willis Gibson’s feat, I’m sure you’ll agree: this type of Tetris is definitely a sport.
Since Alexey Pajitnov created the classic video game in 1985, part of the appeal of Tetris is that it seemed to be “unbeatable.” Unlike other games, there’s no set ending; you just keep going until, eventually, you can’t clear blocks anymore.
For decades, most expert players typically reached that point at level 29. At each level of the game, you must clear 10 lines of blocks, and after you complete each one, the blocks fall a little faster. By level 29, the blocks fall faster than a player can move the joystick to get them in the proper placement. It seemed to be the game’s ending—except gamers all knew that they could keep going, if only they could move a little more quickly. They hadn’t beaten the game at level 29. The game had just beaten them.
In 2011, a player named Thor Ackerland invented a new technique for holding his controller known as “hypertapping,” and he was able to be the first person to ever make it to level 30. It was a breakthrough, and for a while, records continually fell. But as far as players could make it, the blocks kept raining down. The scores grew higher, but the game wouldn’t end.
Almost a decade later, in 2020, came a revolution. A player named ‘Cheez’ (yes, Cheez) created a new technique called “rolling.” “There’s a little D-pad on the controller that you can press down, and it will go left or right,” Willis explained. “Instead of manually just tapping each piece every single time, what you do is you hover your finger over the button just barely so it doesn’t cause an input left or right, and then you roll your fingers on the back of the controller. So each finger causes an input.”
Players started to wear gloves to help reduce friction and were suddenly able to move blocks faster than ever before, new records started to be set seemingly every week. By April 2022, one player reached level 95. By November 2023, the record was pushed all the way to 148.
While the record was pushed further and further, serious players began to wonder just how far the decades-old code could go. All old video games, at some point, reach a “kill screen,” in which a player gets so far that the game essentially crashes. Tetris was the game that never ended. Could it happen? Could it actually be beaten?
Players examined the source code, fed it to AI algorithms, and discovered that, under just the right circumstances, the game might break at level 153. It led to a new frenzy, and a few weeks ago, one of the top players in the world, who goes by the name of Fractal161, announced that he was going to stream his attempts to “break the game” every night until he was successful.
It just so happened that Willis Gibson, the 13-year-old from Stillwater, OK, decided that he was going to try and beat Fractal to history. On that first night, Gibson—who goes by the gamer name “blue scuti”—smashed the world record, reaching level 153, only 18 lines away from the suspected moment when the game could crash. “I was so close,” Gibson said, “I thought I might as well race him for it and beat him to the crash.”
Gibson had picked up Tetris two years prior by watching pro players on YouTube. He and his mother, a math teacher, found an old Nintendo NES at a pawn shop, and from there, Gibson started to practice 3 hours a day, he says. Just a few weeks before breaking the record, Gibson played in his first ever tournament, a regional event in Kansas City. He came out of nowhere and won.
Every night, “Fractal” and the newcomer Gibson would stream their attempts at the record. On Dec. 21, “Fractal” was in the middle of a game when he noticed a flurry of activity in the chat section. He leaned in to read. “Wait, Scuti is at what?” he said using Gibson’s gamer name, and set his controller aside to watch.
Gibson was deep into a game, past level 100, past the point where the game’s usually coordinated blocks started to appear in strange colors. He made it past the point where the blocks glitched and turned black, almost impossible to see. And then he made it to level 155. If other players’ analysis was correct, if he cleared a single line, he would reach the kill screen.
There was just one problem.
Gibson was a little too good. Instead of clearing a single line, he cleared three.
The game marched on, neverending. Gibson, the controller perched on his knee, narrowed his eyes. He cleared level 156, extending his record. And then, on level 157, Gibson maneuvered a block into place, and it happened. The screen froze.
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” Gibson said, hands on his head. “Oh my god!” Eventually, he stammered, out of breath, “I can’t feel my fingers.”
Watching from afar, “Fractal” couldn’t contain himself either: “He did it! He did it!”
For the first time in its history, someone had beaten the game of Tetris.
“It is,” explains David Macdonald, another pro player who runs a popular YouTube channel, “by far the biggest achievement in the 34-year-old history of the pro classic Tetris scene”
The makers of the game agree: Tetris CEO Maya Rogers issued a statement commending Willis’ “monumental achievement.”
Afterwards, local TV crews and national reporters called the 13-year-old Willis to comment on his achievement. “If you set your mind to something and put work into it,” Willis told a local Oklahoma news station, “you will get it if you try hard enough.”
Wouldn’t you know it? He sounded just like an elite athlete, walking off the field after winning a championship.
🤼♂️ If you watched The Iron Claw about the Von Erich family, don’t miss John Spong’s classic Texas Monthly story about the family from 2005.
🥇 2024 is an Olympic year! This summer, we’ll turn our attention towards the Olympics, and the Washington Post has a fascinating look at how the city plans to use the Seine River. There won’t be an opening ceremonies in a stadium; instead, the plan is for athletes to parade down the city’s famed river. The French government has also sunk $1.4 billion into making the river safe enough for Olympic triathletes to use in competition. As the Post says, the plan is “bold, audacious…and risky.”
🏈 After having four seasons cut short due to injury, Washington quarterback Michael Penix Jr. has finally put it all together to get the Huskies to the National Championship. On New Years Day against the Texas Longhorns in the Sugar Bowl, he was as good as just about anybody has ever been in that historic game, slinging it for 430 yards and two touchdowns. His comeback story is one of the best in sports.
🎿 Go skiing over the holiday? Slate has a fascinating article about how two warring companies “ruined skiing.”
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