U.S. teenager becomes first human to beat Tetris with game-ending glitch

A U.S. teenager has beaten classic computer game Tetris, forcing it into a game-ending glitch in a feat previously achieved only by artificial intelligence.

Willis Gibson, 13, a competitive gamer known as "blue scuti," became the first human to reach the "kill screen" of the Nintendo version of the puzzle game, as fellow players followed his progress online.

"Oh my God!" Willis screams repeatedly towards the end of a more than 40-minute video he uploaded to YouTube this week.

"I can't feel my fingers," he adds breathlessly.

The emotion stands in stark contrast to the preceding 35 minutes of gameplay in which Willis, from Oklahoma, sits mostly motionless while rapidly scrolling his fingers across a controller.

It also underlines this big achievement for a community of enthusiasts who play both online and in-person tournaments.

"It's never been done by a human before," Classic Tetris World Championship president Vince Clemente said, according to The New York Times.

"It's basically something that everyone thought was impossible until a couple of years ago."

The brainchild of a Soviet software engineer, Tetris is a simple but highly addictive game in which players must rotate and manipulate falling blocks of different shapes to fit together and create solid lines inside a box.

Once a line (or two, three or four) is formed, it vanishes, leaving more space – and time – to shuffle the following blocks.

(AFP)