One would think that a game as old as Tetris would have been beaten plenty of times, but for decades, it was believed the game was unbeatable. That changed a few days ago when a 13-year-old boy named Willis Gibson found the kill screen of the classic NES game.
The details of the achievement are complex, as there are about a billion versions of Tetris out there, but the classic Nintendo Entertainment System release of the game is one that is still played to this day by competitive leagues and gamers. For decades, it was believed you couldn’t “beat” the game as the pieces moved so fast on level 29 that via normal means, you couldn’t possibly get the pieces to the edges of the play area. However, human beings, being the resilient folks they are, figured out a way to finally do it using button-tapping techniques that are just ridiculous. This led to level 29 finally being beaten and eventually Gibson’s killscreen. The video below explains it in full.
Basically, older puzzle games like Tetris don’t actually have endings. Instead, “beating” one means that you get to a game’s kill screen, which is when the game glitches out because of one error or another. Tetris‘s kill screen was considered impossible to arrive at until these new techniques came along, leading to Willis and another competitive Tetris player attempting to finally get to one in what was a multi-day race to the top. Interestingly, you could technically play even further than Willis did as, unlike Pac-Man, which kill screens every time on a specific level, Tetris only glitches when certain actions are taken, and even if they’re taken, there’s only a certain percent possibility that it will kill the game.
What does this mean? Well, while Willis is the first to officially “beat” Tetris, there still is no true endgame to the game. Theoretically, someone could keep going on and on despite the various challenges presented as laid out in the video. And at 13, Willis has plenty of time to find out.
