Last year, 13-year-old Willis Gibson from Oklahoma became the first person to beat Tetris. The goal of the classic video game is simple: Arrange falling blocks into lines to clear pieces from the playing area. If the blocks stack up to the top of the screen, it’s game over.
Tetris wasn’t designed to have an end. The game’s developers didn’t think it would be possible to make it past level 29, when pieces are falling in just one-third of a second! But if a player manages to keep clearing levels, the game keeps going.
It turns out Tetris’s code, or set of computer instructions, has a weakness: addition. Each time a player clears a line, they earn points. But “if it takes too long to add up the score, the game crashes,” explains Willis, now 14. On December 21, 2023, Willis reached level 157 and activated the game’s “kill screen”—the point at which the game glitches and can no longer be played. It’s the first time this has happened in the game’s nearly 40-year history.