Boy, 13, believed to be the first to ‘beat’ Tetris

Ms. Cox bought a version of a Nintendo console at a pawn shop called a RetroN, which used the same hardware as the original Nintendo console, and an old cathode ray tube television to get it started. Willis said he plays about 20 hours of Tetris in a given week.

“I’m actually fine with it,” said Ms. Cox, a high school math teacher. “He does other things outside of playing Tetris, so it really wasn’t that hard to say ‘OK.’ It was harder to find an old CRT TV than it was to say, ‘Yes, we can do this for a while.’”

For decades, gamers have been ‘beating’ Tetris by hacking the game’s software. But Willis, who has become one of the best Tetris players in the country over the past year, is considered the first to do it on the original hardware.

“It’s never been done by man before,” said Vince Clemente, the chairman of the Classic Tetris World Championship, adding, “It’s actually something that everyone thought was impossible until a few years ago.”

In the competitive Tetris world, the goal is usually to defeat your opponents rather than outlast them. “Trying before the crash” is a completely different approach. It is an act of survival.

“The most important strategy is to play as safely as possible,” said Willis.

It’s a little more complicated than that, said David Macdonald, a video gamer content creator and competitive Tetris player known as aGameScout. In recent years, top players have started using the ‘rolling technique’, a fast tapping method that uses multiple fingers instead of just one or two. This innovation has changed what is possible in competitive Tetris. More and more top players are going for the crash, rather than simply collecting as many points as possible before being defeated by the game.