A 13-year-old is the first human to beat Tetris

Daniel Sims

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What just happened? Tetris is not designed to be beaten. Throughout the game's history of nearly 40 years, people simply assumed that it was designed to continue indefinitely until the player lost. However, the evolving professional Tetris scene, striving for previously unattainable levels, eventually pushed the game's code to its limits.

Professional Tetris player Willis "Blue Scuti" Gibson became the first person to "beat" Tetris some three decades after its original release by playing the game's most extreme levels until it crashed. Even this feat is only one more step on a long journey to discover how far humans can push Tetris.

Tetris doesn't have a traditional ending like most single-player games – it's designed to run until the player loses. For decades, pro players thought they'd reached the theoretical end of the NES version – the agreed-upon regulation version of the game – but recent breakthroughs revolutionized high-level play and put the code's breaking point within reach.

An insightful documentary by aGameScout reveals that the Tetris community long thought beating level 29 was impossible. At this stage, blocks fall faster than a NES controller's movement. This was deemed the first "Killscreen." However, in 2011, Thor Ackerland's innovative "hypertapping" technique, involving rapid finger vibrations, enabled him to be the first to reach level 30.

From there, pro players slowly climbed to higher levels until Christopher "CheeZ" Martinez invented the "rolling" play style in 2020, which involves bouncing the controller up and down in the player's hand and strumming it sort of like a guitar.

Because Tetris speed no longer increases after level 29, rolling has allowed the community to rocket well beyond level 100 in the last few years, but the game soon started showing its true limits.

After level 138, NES Tetris' color scheme begins to deteriorate. Subsequent levels, including one with nearly invisible pitch-black blocks – nicknamed "Charcoal" – pose challenges with their hard-to-distinguish colors, crucial in professional play.

These stages were pivotal in leading players to conditions that could crash the game – a possibility discovered by programmer Greg Cannon in 2021 using Tetris-playing AI. Professional player and researcher Max "HydrantDude" Roy detailed all potential crash points.

Willis Gibson, at just 13 years old, became the first human player to manage the feat and trigger the "True Killscreen" late last month by scoring a single line on level 157, which has a high chance of causing a crash. Yet, other records await conquest.

For example, no one has yet crashed Tetris at the earliest theoretical opportunity by scoring a single upon transitioning to level 155. Pros could also try to speedrun the crash or get the highest possible score before it. However, the ultimate goal in Tetris may be avoiding a crash until reaching level 255, at which point it starts over at level 0. Machines have demonstrated precisely how it can be done, but whether it's humanly possible remains to be seen.

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Makes me wonder does Tetris Effect go indefinitely or does it have a Killscreen?

Would love to see highly ranked professional players play through it as far as they can go.
 
Stop with the ridiculous click-bait headlines already, it's getting super old.

The headline says: A 13-year-old is the first human to beat Tetris
Then the first line of the article says: Tetris is not designed to be beaten.

Really? Is this how desperate this site is for clicks now? Or maybe they need better writers who don't embarrass themselves with ridiculous contradictions like that one.

PS. - Causing a game to lock up is not the same as beating it.
 
PS. - Causing a game to lock up is not the same as beating it.

Woke up with salt last morning ? Geezus.

He's the first to "beat" the game by making it chrash as the game simply stops functioning. There's no end, there's no final level. It just runs until it chrashes and he's the first one to have done that.

The original is just badly programmed - should normally not happen. But it's the final release so yeah.
 
The skills developed to some goal may one day be useful at another field. Don't underestimate one's achievement. Laser technology was once a solution looking for a problem. So yeah, everything can be useful at the right circumstances.
 
I would not be surprised that this is another fraud attempt to get recognition... and it worked...
 
Woke up with salt last morning ? Geezus.

He's the first to "beat" the game by making it chrash as the game simply stops functioning. There's no end, there's no final level. It just runs until it chrashes and he's the first one to have done that.

The original is just badly programmed - should normally not happen. But it's the final release so yeah.
Yes, I woke up with salt because I don't like misleading click-bait articles. Sure buddy.

Words have meanings. You can't just randomly change the meaning of a word to fit your needs. The game wasn't meant to be beaten? Well, let's just call locking it up "beating" it then. Problem solved.

So what if that kid was the first one who managed to lock up a game that wasn't meant to be beaten? What an empty, meaningless achievement. It's like bragging that you were the first one to crap out of a window.

And no, the original game was not badly programmed. It was quite the achievement for the time when it was written. It didn't have an ending because, as the article points out, it was not meant to be beaten. It's supposed to get more and more difficult until you lose. The original programmers didn't account for the fact that 30 years later people with no lives will be spending countless hours playing this game to the limit.
 
If crashing a game is now considered beating it then I've beaten every new game I've played on PC and PS4 on day 1, sometimes before it even hits the menu!
Actually, I've now watched the video and he completes level 255 which is probably the last level in an 8 bit game so he probably has actually beaten it. In 5 years he'll probably be commanding a squadron of Predator drones.

EDIT: Actually I watched the video again and realised that didn't happen. I can only blame early senility.
 
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This is such a click bait article. That kid didn't beat anything. The game crashed. As shown in the video below, the game crashed.
 
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