Controversy Erupts After 13-Year-Old Becomes First to Ever ‘Beat’ Tetris: ‘Not a Life Goal’

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The world of video games was shaken to its core in December when a task previously thought impossible was accomplished — and by a 13-year-old, no less.

As reported on by multiple outlets, ranging from Reuters to The New York Times, 13-year-old Willis Gibson from Stillwater, Oklahoma, became the first person in the world to be widely credited with beating “Tetris,” the thinking man’s video game about dropping strangely shaped blocks to fit perfectly with each other.

Unlike many modern video games that have a clearly defined “win” state, Tetris, which was created in 1985 by Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov, has never offered much in the way of “winning.”

The point of the game, for many, is to simply survive for as long as you can with the dropping blocks coming in at increasingly faster intervals and speeds. Most fans of Tetris aren’t interested in “winning” so much as they are in chasing the next high score. The game ends when the rising tide of blocks exceeds the top of the play area.

So how does one “win” at Tetris, then? By pushing the game past the boundaries that Pajitnov ever dreamed of.

Gibson secured this feat by, effectively, playing Tetris on the Nintendo Entertainment System (the NES version released in 1989), until the game ran out of memory/coding space. He “won” Tetris by making the game crash after it reached the limits of its processing power.

You can watch the wild accomplishment below:

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