A 13-year-old player has become the first to beat the “unbeatable” game of Tetris by breaking it

SAN FRANCISCO – Fallout video game Tetris has met its match in 13-year-old Willis Gibson, who has become the first gamer to officially “beat” the original Nintendo version of the game – by breaking it.

Technically, Willis — also known as “Blue scuti” in the gaming world — has reached what players call the “kill screen,” the point at which a glitch occurs in the Tetris code, crashing the game. This may not seem like a huge victory to anyone who believes that only high scores matter, but it is 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 pretty big deal for players of Tetris, which many have long considered an unbeatable game. This is partly because the game does not have a written ending; These four-block shapes keep falling no matter how good you are at stacking them into disappearing rows. The top players kept looking for ways to extend their winning streak by staying in the game to reach higher and higher levels, but in the end, the game beat them all.

Until on December 21, Willis was able to trigger the kill screen at level 157, which the gaming world regards as a victory for the game – something along the lines of pushing the program beyond its limits.

The makers of Tetris agree. “Congratulations to blue scuti on achieving this extraordinary achievement, one that challenges all prior boundaries of this legendary game,” Tetris CEO Maya Rogers said in a statement. Rogers noted that Tetris will celebrate its 40th anniversary this year and described Willis' win as a “huge achievement.”

It's been a very long road. Early on, “people in the Tetris scene 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 stuck in their twenties and thirties because they didn't know the techniques to get further.” Level 29 presented a particularly difficult obstacle because blocks began falling more quickly than the in-game controller could respond to.

Eventually, the players found ways to make progress, as McDonald chronicled in his detailed video of Willis' victory. In 2011, one of them reached level 30 using a technique called “hyper-tapping,” where the player can rhythmically shake their fingers to move the game controller faster than the game's built-in speed. This technique took players to level 35 by 2018, after which they hit a wall.

The next big thing came in 2020 when a gamer combined the multi-finger technology originally used in arcade video games with a finger placed on the bottom of the controller to push against another finger on top. This much faster approach, called “rolling,” has helped one player reach level 95 in 2022.

Then other obstacles appeared. Since the original developers of Tetris never relied on players pushing the game's boundaries too aggressively, strange quirks began to appear at higher levels. One particularly challenging issue arose with the game's color palette, which traditionally revolved across 10 easily distinguishable patterns. Starting at level 138, random color blocks started to appear – some of which made the blocks very difficult to distinguish against the black background of the game.

Two particularly devilish patterns – one a muted mix of dark blue and green later dubbed “Dusk”, and the other consisting of black, gray and white blocks called “Charcoal” – proved exhausting to players. When combined with the stress of increasingly longer games, which could last 40 minutes or more, progress slowed again, and it took a Tetris AI program called StackRabbit to break this logjam by helping to identify where this might happen. Players go through a glitch that leads to a kill screen, and finally beat the game.

StackRabbit, which managed to reach level 237 before the game crashed, is running on a modified version of Tetris, so its achievements aren't exactly comparable to those of human players. My findings were not immediately applicable to the game played by humans either. But her rounds clearly showed that end-game glitches could be caused by very specific events, such as which pieces were in play or how many lines a player had cleared at one time.

This allows human players to take on the task of mapping all the possible scenarios that could cause such crashes in the original game. This was usually caused when old game code lost its place and started reading its next instructions from the wrong location, generally resulting in garbage injection. The massive efforts spurred by StackRabbit's experiment eventually led to the compilation of a large spreadsheet detailing the game's levels and the specific conditions most likely to trigger a crash.

This is what forced Willis to run for the record. However, he appeared shocked when he dropped in the game at level 157. In his live video, he appeared to hyperventilate before barely gasping “oh my god” several times, clutching his temples and worrying that he might pass out. After placing his hands over his mouth in an apparent attempt to regulate his breathing, he finally shouted, “I can't feel my fingers.”