Oklahoma 13-year-old becomes first person ever to beat Tetris

An Oklahoma teenager is believed to have become the first person ever to defeat the game of Tetris.

In a now-viral video posted to YouTube on Tuesday, 13-year-old Willis Gibson can be seen advancing so far that the game couldn’t keep up with him and crashed.

“I’m going to pass out, I can’t feel my fingers,” Gibson can be heard saying after the game freezes on level 157.

“When I started playing this game I never expected to ever crash the game, or beat it,” he wrote in the video’s description. The teen also shared a link for people to donate to help him attend future gaming events. He previously finished third in the 2023 Classic Tetris World Championship.

It only took Gibson a little over 38 minutes to reach the “kill screen,” or the point where the game becomes unplayable due to its original programming.

The feat makes him the first person on record to beat the game in the 34 years since it was released, reports CNN.

“What happens is you get so far that programmers that made the game, they never expected you to make it that far. And so the game starts breaking down and eventually it just stops,” Gibson said.

Over 200 official variations of the Tetris game have been released on 70 different systems, a Guinness World Record for the most ported video game.

The mobile version created by Electronic Arts in 2006 became the third bestselling video game of all time after recording 100 million sales, according to a Hewlett Packard report from 2023.

Tetris was originally created in 1984 by Soviet engineer Alexey Pajitnov, who said even he became transfixed with an early version.

“I couldn’t stop myself from playing this prototype version, because it was very addictive to put the shapes together,” Pajitnov told CNN in 2019.

The story of how the game was brought to the U.S. from Cold War-era Russia became the subject of the 2023 Apple TV+ film “Tetris,” starring Taron Egerton.

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