A 13-year-old video gamer has achieved what until recently only artificial intelligence could do. He is the first person to defeat the popular computer game Tetris.
Oklahoma City – 13-year-old Willis Gibson became the first player in the world to complete Tetris: On Tuesday (January 2), the American gamer known as “Blue Scuti” reached the so-called “kill screen”. This is the point at which the game becomes overwhelmed by itself and crashes. His Tetris score read “999999” and his screen froze.
It took Willis exactly 38 minutes and 30 seconds to win the game. This is shown in a 42-minute video that the player uploaded to YouTube. The recording clearly shows how much this achievement means to him. “Oh my God!” he screams repeatedly and collapses in his chair, breathing heavily. The video has already been viewed over 1.7 million times. In an interview with the New York Times Willis explained that he was extremely excited. “It's easy to start, but it's really hard to master,” he told the American daily.
Simple trick helps young American win Tetris: hypertapping
Tetris is one of the most famous video games of all time. It was developed in 1984 and has now become a classic. The aim of the game is to manipulate and rotate different shaped blocks so that they fit together and form rows. When a row is complete, it disappears and new blocks have space.
By the way, the film “Tetris” was released on the streaming platform Apple TV in March. This negotiates the political dimension of the success story and creation of the cult game.
Previously it was assumed that Tetris would become too fast and difficult to continue playing after level 29. The blocks fall so quickly that normal players can't even move them away from the center. But Willis can do this because he used a simple trick: moving the directional keys quickly, also called hypertapping. He rolled the fingers of his hand against the back of the controller.
The special technology allows you to move blocks to the side more quickly and thus master even difficult Tetris levels. With this, Willis made it to level 157 before the computer game finally capitulated. Only artificial intelligence has made it this far. Theoretically, the 13-year-old hasn't played the game all the way through: test runs have shown that Tetris has a total of 255 levels.
Incredible Tetris victory was thought impossible
The president of the Tetris World Championship, Vince Clemente, emphasized how special the achievement is: “No one has ever done this before,” he explained New York Times. “Basically, it's something that everyone thought was impossible until a few years ago.” Willis himself has been playing Tetris professionally for a long time. His next goal is to win the world championship.
In September last year, the 5-year-old Serbian Ognjen Žitkovic set a world record. He became the youngest person ever to climb Kilimanjaro on August 6, 2023. At 5895 meters it is the highest mountain in Africa. (jus)
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