Teenager Becomes First to Beat Tetris
It's believed only AI could do it before.
We all know Tetris as this endless game where you stack shapes and try to make full lines of them until it gets out of hand and the figures reach the top of the screen. Well, it's not so endless after all, as proved by a 13-year-old teenager from Oklahoma.
A couple of days ago, Willis Gibson, also known as Blue Scuti, "won" in this famous game when it simply wouldn't drop shapes anymore at level 157, rewarding him with a "kill screen". He is believed to be the first human to do so, as only AI could keep up with the game's accelerating speed. Interestingly, as reported by BBC, players thought level 29 was the maximum for us just until a few years ago.
"I'm gonna pass out," Gibson exclaimed after he realized what had happened. "I can't feel my fingers."
Image credit: Blue Scuti
“It’s never been done by a human before,” Vince Clemente, the president of the Classic Tetris World Championship, told The New York Times, “It’s basically something that everyone thought was impossible until a couple of years ago.”
The teenager has played the game for two years and competed in several Tetris tournaments. Thankfully, his mom isn't against her son's hobby and allows him to play the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) version of Tetris about 20 hours a week.
Sometimes it feels like Tetris has been around forever, but it was actually created by Alexey Pajitnov in 1985 for NES. So after almost 40 years, Gibson becomes the first to beat it but not the last. Just two days after his triumph, a player known as fractal161 achieved the freeze as well on level 155, quickly followed by P1xelAndy.
You might be wondering, how hard can it be to reach this "kill screen"? I'm not a Tetris specialist, so I had to search for the answer, and here's what I found. Even in the videos above, you can see that at some point, the pieces become almost black on the dark screen, which makes it nearly impossible to stack them right when they're falling so fast.
"Furthermore, to get the kill screen, a player must clear a single line of blocks at level 155 at the earliest," explained Adam Downer from Know Your Meme. "During his run, Scuti missed this chance at level 155 and cleared several lines instead of just one. His next chance would be two levels later, and even then, he only had a 70 percent chance to get the kill screen. Gibson was able to clear one line and the game crashed, marking the first time in human history a player had beaten the NES version of Tetris."
The surprising part is that once Gibson did it, other players started reporting their wins almost immediately. As some pointed out, it might be the case of achievable results, when seeing someone break the seemingly impossible record gives you confidence and power to do it as well.
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