A 13-year-old American boy has become the first person ever to beat the popular video game Tetris. The young gamer, Willis Gibson, completed 157 levels of Tetris before the game technically surrendered. Gamers call this kind of ending a “kill screen.” The Tetris program had no more plays to make and so it crashed, freezing the video game. Gibson lives in the Midwestern state of Oklahoma and goes by the gaming name “Blue Scuti.” He can be heard repeatedly shouting “Oh my God” on a video recording as he beat the game. “I can’t feel my fingers,” Gibson says in the video. Gaming experts had long considered Tetris unbeatable. This is partly because the video game does not have a clear ending point. Tetris came out in 1984 and quickly became a worldwide favorite. Its creator, Alexey Pajitnov, was a computer programs engineer at the Russian Academy of Sciences in the former Soviet Union. During the game, players move and join together seven different shapes of falling blocks. The goal is for players to fit the blocks together to form solid lines inside a box. The blocks fall faster as players progress through higher levels of the game. On December 21, Gibson reached level 157 and dropped a final piece into place. This caused a single line of blocks to disappear and the game to enter a permanent freeze.
