After captivating generations of gamers for 40 years, the video game Tetris was finally defeated by an American teenager, a feat previously only achieved by artificial intelligence.
At the age of 13, Willis Gibson became the first person to reach the end of this great Nintendo classic, in which the player must match blocks falling at increasing speeds to form complete lines and make them disappear.
This addictive puzzle game, created by a Soviet engineer, has no real ending: when the machine can no longer keep up, the screen suddenly freezes.
This is what happened to the teenager, also known as “Blue Scuti,” when he reached level 157 after 38 minutes of effort.
“Oh my God,” the young man shouts as the game stops, in a video of his game posted on YouTube. “I can’t feel my fingers anymore,” he breathes, overwhelmed with emotion.
“No human has ever done this,” Tetris World Championship President Vince Clemente told the New York Times. “This is something that until a few years ago everyone thought was impossible.”
For a long time, level 29 was considered the limit of Tetris, when the game becomes so fast that people can no longer react quickly enough.
But in recent years, a new generation of gamers have pushed the boundaries of what's possible by adopting the “rolling” technique, which reinvents the way the NES console controller is used: it allows the use of all fingers and not just one or two, dramatically increasing the frequency of pressures.
Willis Gibson, originally from Oklahoma, used this process to set his record a few months before the 40th anniversary of the game, which was released in June 1984.
An achievement that is widely praised in the gaming community.
The general director of Tetris, Maya Rogers, also congratulated the young player.
“Congratulations to “Blue Scuti” for this extraordinary achievement that breaks all the preconceived boundaries of this legendary game,” she commented in a press release sent to the website popsci.com.