Willis Gibson spent more than a half-hour on Dec. 21 commanding a seemingly endless waterfall of blocks as they shot down his screen at a faster and faster pace. Then, at the 38-minute mark, the blocks stopped.
For seemingly the first time ever, a human being beat “Tetris.”
From his bedroom in Stillwater, Okla., the 13-year-old who plays as “Blue Scuti” became the first person to drive the classic Nintendo Entertainment System game to a “true kill screen” — the term top players like Willis use to describe when the game freezes because it can’t keep up with score computations, said David Macdonald, a professional “Tetris” player. Willis’s achievement shattered a decades-old belief that the game was unbeatable, dogma that came into question only in recent years after an artificial intelligence program tripped the kill screen and professionals developed more efficient techniques of handling the original Nintendo controller.
