After creating an obsession for generations of gamers for 40 years, the video game Tetris was finally defeated by an American teenager, a feat that was previously only possible through artificial intelligence.
13-year-old Willis Gibson has become the first human to reach the end of this classic Nintendo game, where the player must juggle blocks that fall at increasing speed, to form complete lines and make them disappear.
Developed by a Soviet engineer, this addictive puzzle game has no actual ending: when the machine can’t continue, the screen suddenly freezes.
This is what happened to the teenager nicknamed Blue Scuti when he reached level 157 after 38 minutes of effort.
“Oh my God… I can’t feel my fingers anymore,” the teenager exclaimed when the game stopped, as seen in a video of his game posted on YouTube.
“This has never been done before by a human being,” Vince Clemente, president of the Tetris World Championship, told the New York Times. “It’s something that everyone thought was impossible until a few years ago.”
For a long time, level 29 was considered the limit for Tetris, when it becomes too fast for humans to react quickly enough.
But in recent years, a new generation of gamers has pushed the limits of what is possible by adopting the “rolling” technology, which changes the way the NES controller is used. It allows all fingers to be used instead of just one or two, which greatly increases the frequency of pressing.
Oklahoma native Willis Gibson used this process to create his record a few months before the 40th anniversary of the game, which was released in June 1984. An achievement that was widely welcomed by the gamer community.
Tetris General Manager, Maya Rogers, also congratulated the young player. She said in a statement published on the popsci.com website: “Congratulations to Blue Scotty for this exceptional work that challenges all the preset limits of this legendary game.”
(AFP)
