Video game history has been made this week after Oklahoma teenager Willis Gibson was able to do what no one thought was possible. The 13-year old is believed to be the first person to beat the original Tetris, reaching level 157. “I’m going to pass out, I can’t feel my fingers,” Gibson said after his feat caused the game to crash in a video posted to YouTube Tuesday.
“When I started playing this game I never expected to ever crash the game, or beat it,” Gibson wrote in the video’s description.
Gibson finished third in the 2023 Classic Tetris World Championship. In 2021, a Tetris-playing AI got to level 236 by manipulating the game parameters.
Players believed that level 29 was the highest you could reach until 2011. Once the level 29 barrier was broken, players started reaching higher and higher levels in tournaments like the Classic Tetris World Championship with techniques including “hypertapping” and “rolling.”
The original Tetris game was created back in 1984 and was popularized on the Nintendo Entertainment system. Since then, over 200 official variants of the game has been released on at least 70 systems which is according to Guinness World Records, a world record. The EA developed mobile version released in 2006 has sold 100 million copies making it the third best-selling video game of all time, according to a Hewlett Packard report last year.
Creator Alexey Pajitnov said he was instantly hooked after creating the game. “I couldn’t stop myself from playing this prototype version, because it was very addictive to put the shapes together,” Alexey Pajitnov told CNN in 2019.
Experts say the simplicity of Tetris is the main reason why it has endured for decades.
“It’s so well designed and so captivating for so many generations of gamers that people are literally discovering new feats to accomplish and scores to beat and challenges to overcome,” video game expert and consultant Scott Steinberg told CNN. “It constantly presents a host of new challenges that even masters find difficult to tackle.”
“It hooked with us in almost like a primitive state,” said Victor Lucas, a gaming expert behind television series Electric Playground. “It transcends video games, quite frankly, like checkers or chess. It’s just one of these Juggernaut play experiences that any human being can understand immediately and be consumed by eternally.”
“Even during a time when some video games “cost as much to make and look as good as many movies coming out of Hollywood, there’s still something to be said for a game that’s simple, elegant, incredibly approachable and enjoyable by players of any age or background,” Steinberg said. “Sometimes simpler is better, and the greatest games really do stand the test of time.”