Watch the Moment When a 13-Year-Old Becomes the First Person to Ever “Beat” Tetris


On Decem­ber 21, Willis Gib­son, a 13-year-old from Still­wa­ter, Okla­homa, became the first per­son to push Tetris to its absolute lim­it. Around the 38:20 mark of the video above, Gib­son advances to Lev­el 157 and soon encoun­ters Tetris’ “kill screen.” Real­iz­ing that he’s bro­ken Tetris for the first time (Alex­ey Pajit­nov designed the game in 1985), the young­ster near­ly hyper­ven­ti­lates. Even­tu­al­ly catch­ing his breath, he declares, “I can’t feel my fin­gers.”

On YouTube, Gib­son adds: “When I start­ed play­ing this game I nev­er expect­ed to ever crash the game, or beat it.” Accord­ing to The Okla­homan, Gib­son “ded­i­cat­ed his win to his dad, who died last month.”

via New York Times

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!



Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *