A 13-year-old boy recently did something that everybody thought was impossible – he beat Tetris.
Originally released in 1989, Willis Gibson of Oklahoma managed to break the block-clearing game during a crazy 38-minute session on December 21. He was playing the game on the original Nintendo Entertainment System.
The teenager, who plays Tetris competitively and is one of the top players in the world, managed to reach level 157 before the game froze when he cleared a line.
As the game froze, Gibson sat up and started to breathe heavily as he realised what happened. Instead of losing, when the blocks reach the top of the screen, Gibson defeated the game, causing it to lock up.
Before he reached level 157, the game started acting weird, displaying random letters and numbers for each level. For example, when he passed level 29, the game displayed 00 instead of 30. It kept displaying seemingly random numbers and letters the further he got. His score stopped going up once he reached 999,999 points, which is the highest score the game can display.
When he reached 999 lines, the game could no longer keep up because it could only display three numbers, so it read A-00 and kept increasing by 1 with every subsequent clear.
CNN spoke with the chairman of the Tetris company, Henk Rogers, about the seemingly impossible achievement.
“Are you kidding me? How many years have it been?” Rogers wondered. “That is such an amazing accomplishment.”
Rogers explained that when the game was designed back in the 1980s, the designers never envisioned that somebody would be able to clear so many lines and didn’t code the game to go any further.
