Danny Gallagher chats to the king of Tetris
For almost 40 years, Tetris has remained unbeaten.
Then on 21 December 2023, Willis Gibson of Stillwater, Oklahoma, known on Twitch and to Tetris World Championship fans as @bluescuti, became the first person to break the NES game after just 40 minutes. Overnight, the whole world learned his name and his impressive accomplishment. We caught up with him and his mother Karin at his 14th birthday party at Immersive Gamebox in The Colony, Texas.
What’s life been like since you broke the game?
Willis: Lots of interviews. My mom is getting flooded with calls. Karin: For a while there, I couldn’t keep up with all of them.
How long have you been playing Tetris and when did you get good at it, or have you always been good at it?
Willis: I started in August 2021, but I didn’t get to the high-level tournaments until mid-2023, so probably about two years of playing the lower run of tournaments. I just stuck with it since then. The first time I made the Masters Event, which is the highest tournament every month, I think I made that in September 2023. So it took me over two years to get to the top, I guess.
How did you get into Tetris?
Willis: I met a guy named GameScout. I found his videos on YouTube and I was like, This is cool’. Once I started playing it, I really started enjoying its simplicity. It’s really easy to begin with, but it’s super hard to master.
Did you set out to get a kill screen or did you even know if it was possible?
Willis: People have figured it out because of AI and people can do what’s called a TAS [tool-assisted speedrun]. Basically they go frame by frame and they manually input the inputs so people crash the game doing those but no human had actually done it. I guess how I started going forward is two days before I got the world record, I was just not going for a crash at all and I was 18 lines away. That same day, another player called Fractal [Justin Yu] started going for it and he took my record the next day. So I said, “OK, I’m gonna get it back,” and the next day, I crashed the game.
When you broke it, how did you feel? What was going through your head?
Willis: Mainly shock. I guess because there’s one spot where the game can 100% of the time cra
