A casual gamer could reasonably assume that, after nearly 35 years, there aren’t many achievements left to attain in the original Nintendo version of Tetris. Willis “blue scuti” Gibson, however, is not a casual gamer by any stretch of the imagination. And on December 21, the 13-year-old pulled off a seemingly impossible feat—he became the first person to “break” the classic puzzle game.
During a livestream, Gibson shocked viewers (and himself) by encountering a never-before-documented, game-ending glitch while playing Tetris on Level 157. To pull off an achievement many once believed impossible, Gibson relied on hours of training, a dedicated community of like-minded gamers, as well as a decades’ deep history of playing innovation, statistical analysis, and perseverance.
Check out a lengthy rundown of the historic gaming moment from aGameScout below:
A glitch nearly four decades in the making
First designed by Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov in 1984, Tetris eventually made its way to the US in 1988 via a number of ports, including the popular NES cartridge game. You can read the surprisingly intricate history of Tetris development and licensing here.
Tetris has long been a go-to for competitive gamers across the world. For decades, players widely believed the classic game’s Level 29 to be its highest achievable level. At that point, the falling block speed becomes so fast that it’s difficult to consistently move pieces to either side of the playing field using the NES controller, ensuring an eventual loss. This technically wasn’t a “kill screen,” per se, in which a coding error crashes a game. Level 29 doesn’t include a game glitch, but because it wasn’t physically possible to keep up, most everyone accepted Level 29 to ostensibly be the original Tetris kill screen.
After 22 years, however, the world of Tetris was upended thanks to…
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