Oklahoma teen finally beats the unbeatable game: Tetris

(CNN) — It appears that a 13-year-old boy from Oklahoma has finally done the nearly impossible: He beat Tetris.

Willis Gibson is believed to be the first human player to reach level 157 of the classic video game, nearly 40 years after its release.

“I’m going to faint, I can’t feel my fingers,” Gibson said in a video posted to YouTube on Tuesday after his stunt caused the game to crash.

“When I started playing this game, I never thought the game would crash or crash,” Gibson wrote in the video description.

Viral video of Gibson’s 38-minute game, posted under his username “Blue Scotty”, was created by a Soviet engineer in 1984 and popularized on the Nintendo Entertainment System for its addictive and long-lasting gameplay The episode is the latest in a trend of increasing nostalgia. ,

To date, over 200 official Tetris variants have been released on at least 70 systems, a world record according to Guinness World Records. The mobile version, developed by Electronic Arts and released in 2006, has been sold 100 million times, making it the third best-selling video game of all time, Hewlett Packard reported last year.

The creator himself has said that after creating the game he was immediately attracted to it.

“I couldn’t help playing this prototype version, because putting the shapes together was so addicting,” Alexey Pajitnov told CNN in 2019.

After its creation, Tetris spread rapidly and has had lasting staying power. The story, set in the Cold War era, was adapted into a movie for Apple TV+ in March.

Victor Lucas, the gaming expert behind the television series Electric Playground, said, “It grips us to an almost primitive state. Frankly, it goes beyond video games like checkers or chess. It’s one of those gaming experiences ” Any human being can understand immediately and consume eternally.”

The game is simple: manipulate falling blocks in different ways and connect them to form solid lines. As the level goes up, the blocks fall faster.

While other video games today offer storylines, hundreds of characters, cinema-like scenes, and even a live concert by Travis Scott, some experts say Tetris’s simplicity is what has kept it popular for decades.

Although Tetris has remained the same for decades, the way it is played has evolved. By 2011, players believed that level 29 was the highest possible because that level had the fastest speed in the game.

“It’s so well designed and so attractive to multiple generations of gamers that people are literally discovering new achievements to beat and challenges to overcome,” video game expert and consultant Scott Steinberg told CNN. Have to get.” “It presents a series of consecutive ones.” New challenges which are difficult even for teachers to solve.

The staying power of Tetris stems from both the game’s simplicity and its difficulty.

Once the level 29 barrier was broken, players began reaching higher and higher levels in tournaments such as the Classic Tetris World Championship with techniques including “hypertapping” and “rolling”.

Gibson, 13, from Oklahoma, finished third at the 2023 World Championships. And while Gibson is a record-breaking human player, a Tetris-playing AI reached level 236 in 2021 by manipulating the game’s parameters.

Even in an age where some video games cost as much as “and look as good as many Hollywood movies,” there’s still something to be said about games that are fun for any level, age. Simple, elegant, incredibly accessible, and fun for gamers. Or background,” Scott Steinberg told CNN. “Sometimes simpler is better and the best games really stand the test of time.”