The last thing teenager Willis Gibson expected when he was crowned the first known person to “beat” Tetris and reach its “kill screen,” where the game runs out of memory and crashes. According to VGC, the feat has never been achieved away from an AI playing the game.
“It’s never been done by a human before,” Classic Tetris World Championship President Vince Clemente said. “It’s basically something that everyone thought was impossible until a couple of years ago.”
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The “kill screen” has been reached for other classic games, notably Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. The latter was shown in plenty of detail in King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, which impressed plenty who were in the gaming sphere. It did not impress Sky News anchor Jayne Secker.
The 51-year-old journalist reported on the story earlier in the week, outlining the feat and the surprise by Gibson. But as VGC and staff member Chris Scullion pointed out, the anchor went off script at the end of the segment.
“As a mother, I would just say step away from the screen, go outside, get some fresh air. Beating Tetris is not a life goal,” Secker said on the broadcast, earning the ire of many online and in the industry. In the U.K., Bhavina Bharkhada, head of communications at the UKIE trade body, slammed the comments and made a good comparison.
“What’s bonkers about how this has been covered is if it was, say a child chess champion, we’d all be celebrating – they’d even be invited to Downing Street to play chess,” she wrote on social media. Becky Frost at Rare followed suit, calling the comments “small-minded.”
“Beating Tetris is not a life goal’ …yeah, for YOU, Sandra. How many world records had YOU set at 13 years old?” Frost wrote. “What a small-minded, smug & horrible way to belittle this kid’s achievement. As A MoTheR I’d be super f-ing proud. This took skill & determination, brilliant job!”
Gibson’s mother is fine with the feat and has shown her support in the past. “I’m actually OK with it,” she told the New York Times. “He does other things outside of playing Tetris, so it really wasn’t that terribly difficult to say OK. It was harder to find an old CRT TV than it was to say, ‘Yeah, we can do this for a little bit.’”
Secker is far from the first person to call out video games as a waste, but it is ignoring 30-40 years of progress beyond what kids were doing when she was a teen. It is different than getting good at a yo-yo or spending time playing with toys.
