Tetris is an old-school video game, released nearly 40 years ago. But a 13-year-old from Oklahoma just pulled off a new trick on the classic, being the first player to truly beat the game.
Willis Gibson, 13, of Stillwater, Okla., recently earned the ultimate achievement in the game, developed by Russian scientist Alexey Pajitnov in 1984. He successfully manipulated the waves of falling shapes for more than 38 minutes until the game crashed, as can be seen in a video posted on his YouTube page, and reached the “kill screen.”
“It’s never been done by a human before,” said 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.”Tetris arrived on the video game world first as a PC game, but it exploded in 1989 when it was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System and bundled with the Nintendo Game Boy handheld. In the past, when players hit the 29th level of the game, pieces fell so fast players weren’t able to catch up – only an artificial intelligence program had beaten the game, video game news site Polygon reported.
How did an Oklahoma teenager beat Tetris?
Younger players have learned how to keep up with the game – and go to previously unforeseen levels – by using innovative technique such as “hypertapping,” where the player uses the directional arrows, not just the left and right buttons, so the controller moves faster,…
