STILLWATER, Okla. — Willis Gibson of Stillwater, Oklahoma, made history on December 21, 2023. That's the day he became the first person believed to have beaten the game of Tetris.
The game, created by Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov in 1985 and an ongoing obsession to countless gamers for almost four decades now, was previously thought to be unbeatable -- even by the licensors and manufacturers behind the game.
Gibson, for his part, is relatively new to the game. Now 14, but 13 at the time of his feat, he only started playing Tetris about two years ago.
He got good at it quickly, too, playing Nintendo a couple of hours every day to ensure he'd improve.
In fact, he got so good at the game, that he maxed out the score at 999,999 before long.
But that's when his journey to video game greatness really began.
See, the best Tetris players in the world have all maxed out the high score counter.
True immortality is found in what they achieve after hitting that milestone.
Watch the full stream of Gibson's milestone Tetris game:
A quick glance around Gibson's bedroom in Stillwater, and it's easy to consider him an old soul. Immediately, you'll notice an original NES, an N64 gaming console and an old box TV.
Many of the consoles he keeps here are older than he is -- much older.
It's easy to wonder if Gibson was simply born in the wrong era.
"I think he's born in the right era to bring stuff back," his mother Karin Cox says with a laugh.
But, ever since he started playing Tetris competitively as an 11-year-old, Gibson has actually gotten used to being the youngest among his peers. In tournaments both in person and online, he regularly competes against adults who've been playing the game far longer than he has.
In this community, he goes by the gamer tag of Blue Scuti.
It's the community, he says, that helped get him to the point where he "broke" Tetris.
Watch the moment when Blue Scuti "beat" Tetris:
Before he became Blue Scuti, or a certified Tetris hero, Gibson had proven himself good with his hands.
He's a whiz at the Rubik's Cube, another game -- albeit a more analog one -- involving blocks and colors and quickly moving your fingers.
His natural knack for that transferred well to the world of Tetris. Then, through YouTube, he discovered a playing technique called "rolling" that further played to his strengths. It's a tactic employed by all the best Tetris players who stream their gameplay online.
In the simplest terms, the "rolling" method finds gamers tapping the back of their Nintendo controllers, allowing them to faster hit the directional pads.
It speeds up the whole process of moving blocks, allowing players to have more control over the falling pieces, even as they continue to drop at increasing speeds.
Or as Gibson himself puts it: "You can shoot pieces to the left and right."
Watch Blue Scuti explain the "rolling" technique he uses to play Tetris:
One December afternoon, Gibson was rolling along while on winter break from school. And everything fell into place.
He was streaming his Tetris efforts on Twitch that day. Then the unthinkable happened: He became the first person in recorded history to "beat" the game.
But how do you beat a game that programmers designed to go on forever? Technically, you beat its code. You play for far longer than programmers ever intended anyone to, and you force the whole system to crash, eliciting what's known as a "killscreen."
That's exactly what Gibson did by reaching level 157 and clearing more than 1,500 lines in one sitting.
He was in shock in that moment.
The game he was playing had frozen. Meanwhile, he started moving involuntarily, screaming with astonishment.
"I couldn't feel my fingers," he says now, with a laugh. "I was mainly hyperventilating."
Adds his mother, proudly: "It was the first time the game didn't beat the player."
Watch our fill interview with Blue Scuti:
It was also more than just that.
The game had crashed in that moment, but earlier in the month, so had Willis Gibson's world. His father Adam Gibson, 39, died of a heart attack just a week before his son's world-recognized accomplishment.
"Right after he crashed the game, the next day was visitation," Cox says now.
Gibson says his father's passing didn't provide him additional motivation for beating the game. But his mother points out that the game gave her son a moment to cope from the heavy loss.
Either way, Gibson dedicated the feat to his late father.
"I wanted to do that," he says. "So I did."
What better tribute than to beat the game of his dad's generation?
For his next act, Gibson says he'll likely mine similar territory. He says he's started looking for another game to master. He's been eyeing one particular game as his next target. It's another original Nintendo throwback: Super Mario Bros.
Another classic Blue Scuti move.
"When your kid wants to do something," Cox says, "you just find a way to do it."