A 13-year-old just completed Tetris on NES – how’s your 2024 going?

Did you know Tetris could be ‘beaten’? I didn’t. So it came as a surprise to hear the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) version of the game has been defeated.

The sports world might be going mad for 16-year old darts player Luke Littler, but a 13-year-old from Oklahoma in the United States got all the way to level 157 while playing the game, most famous for its run on the Game Boy, for 38 minutes.

He didn’t get any notification to say he had completed the game, as you’d expect in a game like Super Mario Bros., he simply caused the game to crash. Effectively, he got to the kill screen when the game simply ran out of blocks to drop and froze with the score on 999,999.

The successful attempt was documented on his YouTube channel that shows teenager Willis Gibson, who posts on YouTube under the name Blue Scuti, going where no man, boy, woman, or girl had ever gone before.

Previously, it wasn’t known there was a way to beat the original Tetris game, which perhaps pioneered addictive gameplay when it arrived 34 years ago. Upon near-hyperventilation after achieving the feat, Gibson said: “I’m going to pass out, I can’t feel my fingers.” (via BBC)

In the video description, he wrote: “When I started playing this game I never expected to ever crash the game, or beat it.” You can watch the entire attempt below.

Once upon a time it wasn’t thought possible to get past level 29 on the game invented by Russian Alexey Pajitnov. However, in more recent times, techniques such as “rolling” have enabled gamers to push past previously plausible limits.

The technique adopted by competitive gamers involves rapidly tapping underneath the controller with fingers on the D-Pad in order to speed up how the Tetris blocks are rotated. This opened up the possibility for greater scores than the previously deployed hypertapping technique.