999999. With cramped hands and a stunned look on his face, 13-year-old Oklahoman Willis Gibson, a competitive Tetris player, became the first person to ever beat the iconic game on the original Nintendo Entertainment System, according to The New York Times.
Made in 1989, Tetris was long thought unbeatable. However, as NYT wrote: “Willis got to Level 157, reaching Tetris’s ‘kill screen,’ the point where a video game becomes unplayable because of limitations in its coding. (In the video, when the game freezes, the screen reads that Willis had made it to Level 18. That’s because the code wasn’t designed to advance so high.)”
Added Vince Clemente, the president of the Classic Tetris World Championship: “It’s never been done by a human before. It’s basically something that everyone thought was impossible until a couple of years ago.”
The teen has played competitively since 2021 under the name Blue Scuti and placed third overall in the most recent World Championship (so far, he’s made about $3,000 playing in tourneys). His next goal is to take first place.