Los Angeles (AFP) – An American teenager has become the first human being to beat the classic computer game Tetris, forcing it to a game-ending failure, in a feat until now only achieved by artificial intelligence.
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Willis Gibson, a 13-year-old gamer known as 'Blue scuti', managed to reach the “death screen” of Nintendo's version of the famous “puzzle”, while other players followed his progress on the Internet.
“Oh my God!” Willis shouted repeatedly toward the end of a more than 40-minute video he posted to YouTube this week.
“I can't feel my fingers,” he said breathlessly.
That excitement contrasted with the previous 35 minutes of play, in which the Oklahoma teenager remains nearly motionless as he quickly slides his fingers across a controller.
“It's never been done by a human being before,” said Classic Tetris World Championship president Vince Clemente, according to 'The New York Times'. “It's basically something that everyone thought was impossible until a couple of years ago.”
⚠️ | This is the moment 13-year-old Willis “Blue Scuti” Gibson “beats Tetris” and becomes the first person to crash the game.
Previously, only the AI had forced the game to “break”, with blocks falling too quickly.pic.twitter.com/Fk5s3oS9Qy
— PAABLOO64🕹️ (@PAABLOO64) January 3, 2024
The brainchild of a Soviet software engineer, Tetris is a simple but highly addictive game in which players must rotate and manipulate falling blocks of different shapes to fit them together and create solid lines inside a box.
Once a line (or two, three or four) is formed, it disappears, leaving more space – and time – to mix the next blocks.
The pieces fall faster as the player progresses through the levels, until reaching level 29, which was long believed to be the end of the game and the point at which the figures move too fast for humans to react.
Willis' record
For some time, gamers have known that there is a point at which the code fails and the game stops, but only one other computer has been able to reach it.
All until December 21, when Willis was at level 157 and placed a piece in place that made a line of blocks disappear and froze the game.
Tetris CEO Maya Rogers joined the celebrations, telling the specialized portal popsci.com that it was an appropriate achievement ahead of the video game's 40th anniversary in 2024.
“Congratulations to 'Blue scuti' for achieving this extraordinary achievement, a feat that defies all preconceived limits of this legendary game,” he said in a statement.
#39Blue #scuti39 #teenager #USA #human #beat #Tetris
