In the nearly 40 years that the game of Tetris has been around, not one person had ever beat the game, until a 13-year-old boy, with heavy ties to Ottawa, did it last month. Willis Gibson, who spent a lot of time in Ottawa with his grandfather Everett Cox, and lived in the Garnett area before moving to Oklahoma. On December 21st he sat in his bedroom playing Tetris and suddenly his screen froze with a tetris score of 999,999. Willis became the first person to advance so far in the original Nintendo version of the puzzle game Tetris that the game froze, achieving a feat previously credited only to artificial intelligence.
Gibson, who has played Tetris competitively since 2021 under the name “Blue Scuti” , reached level 157, reaching Tetris’ “kill screen,” the point where a video game becomes unplayable because of limitations in its coding. It’s a very big deal for players of Tetris, which many had long considered unbeatable. That’s partly because the game doesn’t have a scripted ending; those four-block shapes just keep falling no matter how good you get at stacking them into disappearing rows. Not bad for a 13-year-old kid from the Ottawa area.
