An Oklahoma teenager has finally beaten the unbeatable game: Tetris.
(CNN) — A 13-year-old boy from Oklahoma seems to have finally achieved the almost impossible: he beat Tetris.
Willis Gibson is believed to be the first human player to reach level 157 in the classic video game, nearly 40 years after its release.
“I’m going to pass out, I can’t feel my fingers,” Gibson said after his stunt crashed the game in a video posted to YouTube on Tuesday.
“When I started playing this game, I never expected the game to crash or crash,” Gibson wrote in the video description.
Gibson’s viral video of the 38-minute game, posted under his username “Blue Scuti,” is the latest in a trend of growing nostalgia for the addictive and enduring game created by a Soviet engineer in 1984 and popularized on the Nintendo Entertainment System. .
To date, more than 200 official variants of Tetris have been released on at least 70 systems, which is a world record according to the Guinness Book of Records. The mobile version, developed by Electronic Arts and released in 2006, has sold 100 million times, making it the third best-selling video game of all time, according to a Hewlett Packard report last year.
The creator himself said that he was immediately hooked after creating the game.
“I couldn’t help but play this version of the prototype because putting the pieces together was so much fun,” Alexey Pajitnov told CNN in 2019.
After its creation, Tetris quickly spread and has enduring power. that its Cold War-era beginnings were turned into a movie for Apple TV+ in March.
“It hooked us in an almost primitive state,” said Victor Lucas, a gaming expert who created the TV series “The Electric Playground.” “Frankly, it goes beyond video games like checkers or chess. It’s just one of those gaming experiences.” “. anyone can understand immediately and consume forever.”
The game is simple: control the blocks that fall in different ways and connect them to form continuous rows. As the level increases, blocks fall faster.
While other video games today offer stories, hundreds of characters, cinematic-like visuals and even live concerts from Travis Scott, some experts say Tetris’ simplicity is what has kept it popular for decades.
While Tetris has remained the same for decades, the way it is played has changed. Before 2011, players considered level 29 to be the highest level possible because it had the highest speed in the game.
“It’s so well designed and so appealing to generations of gamers that people are literally discovering new achievements, scores to beat and challenges to overcome,” video game expert and consultant Scott Steinberg told CNN. “He constantly presents a series of new problems that even teachers find difficult to solve.
Tetris’s staying power comes 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 using techniques such as “hyper tapping” and “rolling”.
Gibson, a 13-year-old boy from Oklahoma, placed third at the 2023 World Championships. And while Gibson holds the human record, an AI playing Tetris reached level 236 in 2021 by manipulating the game’s parameters.
Even in an era where some video games “cost as much and look as good as many Hollywood movies,” there’s still something to be said for a game that’s simple, elegant, incredibly accessible, and fun for gamers of all levels and ages. or biography,” Scott Steinberg told CNN. “Sometimes simpler is better, and the best games really stand the test of time.”