13-year-old's reaction to becoming the first person ever to beat video game Tetris is so wholesome

The craze for the video game Tetris is real. It is one of those classic games that have been around forever, with many people trying to break records. But what many people are not aware of is that the game has never been successfully completed. No one had ever seen the 'kill screen' message for this game until 13-year-old Willis Gibson managed to achieve the feat in December. The pursuit of 'ending' Tetris has been popular within the community for many years. Many gamers before Gibson have tried to achieve this feat and managed to cross levels above 250, as per IFL Science. Over time, people realized that it did not matter how many levels people crossed; it was about putting the right line at the right time and Gibson did it. Seconds after the teen achieved the unimaginable, he fell back into his chair and said in disbelief: "I'm going to pass out, I can't feel my fingers."

The gaming community initially thought that level 29 was the last phase of Tetris. This was thought to be because it was at this level that the speed maxed out. But, after years of experimenting and hard work, dedicated gamers were able to beat it. To their surprise, even after going through that level, they were not bestowed with the 'kill screen' message. Therefore, the players decided to continue on until they reached their objective. They found that in higher levels, the game was glitching but still functioning. As people began clearing the advanced levels, they also faced bricks that were changing colors which added another layer of complexity.

A breakthrough happened in 2021 when programmer Greg Cannon created StackRabbit, a Tetris-playing artificial intelligence (AI) program. The program was able to go through the advanced level with all its glitches and reach level 237. At this stage, the game completely stopped and froze. This was quite disappointing for the gamers who were wishing for an end screen.

YouTuber aGameScout explained this phenomenon. "The game’s code starts to become really inefficient on very high levels because no one was expected to get this far and eventually a glitch happens where the game switches from reading instructions from the code to reading the RAM as if it were code. If the resulting garble generates a stop command, it completely breaks the game, leading to it being called the true kill screen."

Understanding this, the gamer community then began to search for the level where this stop command gets generated. People eventually concluded that the command must be triggered at level 155. Thus began the pursuit amongst the gamers to get to that level and trigger the command. The methodology for triggering the command is clearing a single line. Gibson took on the challenge and went to Level 155, but narrowly missed his opportunity. He still did not give up and went on to Level 157 for another chance. This time he attained success and was able to clear the line to trigger the 'kill screen' command. This definitively made the teenager the first human to beat Tetris.

Gibson was in utter shock after he achieved his target. Seeing so many people try it before him and fail, he had immense pride in his determination. "When I started playing this game, I never expected to ever crash the game or beat it," Gibson said on his YouTube channel, adding, "This run was also the Overall Score, Level, Lines, and 19 Score world record."