The Revolution in Classic Tetris

It was the final match of the 2016 Classic Tetris World Championship, and Jeff Moore, a thirty-six-year-old from Las Vegas, was playing out of his mind. “Boom!” the announcers yelled with each four-line clearance. “Tetris for Jeff!” Their enthusiasm couldn’t be contained. Jeff’s opponent, a taproom manager in his mid-thirties named Jonas Neubauer, had won the world title five times. Jeff had never even been close. Could he defeat the Michael Jordan of falling blocks? “He’s ready for a Tetris—where is the long bar? Are we going to see it?” the announcers cried, talking over one another, voices stacking in intensity. After a few seconds, the longed-for rectangle arrived. Four lines, cleared. Jeff, who was staring placidly at an outdated television set, was soaring to the pinnacle of piece-piling.

Alas, Jeff could not shake the Tetris hierarchy. Jonas beat him handily, sending him home with a silver T-piece trophy and a five-hundred-dollar prize. Trey Harrison, the tournament’s chief technical officer, helped to upload the match footage to YouTube, mainly for archival purposes. Months later, he noticed something strange. “It was just blowing up,” he said. “I don’t know why. The views just kept climbing and climbing and climbing.” Soon there were spin-offs. Someone compiled every “Boom, Tetris!” from the match into a video that stretched more than two minutes. Another user posted a quick-cut video of the tournament’s especially meme-able moments. “Boom, Tetris for Jeff!” was a sensation.

The first Classic Tetris World Championship took place in 2010, when it was staged for the documentary “Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters.” The goal was to settle the debate, long constrained to obscure Internet message boards, about who was the world’s best classic-Tetris player. Jonas Neubauer was one of those competitors. Born in 1981, he began playing the game in elementary school, established dominance over his family members, and then, like most others, stopped.

He started playing again during breaks from college. Since Tetris wasn’t beatable, he just kept playing until he got close to a max-out score—a six-digit total of 999,999, when the game stopped counting. He dug around the Internet to see if anyone had maxed out, but didn’t find anything conclusive. Jonas decided to go for it. Though he knew that high scores required lots of Tetrises—building four rows high and then clearing them at once with a long bar—no one understood the most efficient way to achieve them. He’d build bizarre-looking playfields, forcing himself to resolve the problems posed by the Tetris stacks in novel ways. Some pieces, spun at just the right time, cleared lines and filled spaces that would have otherwise created pesky gaps in his stack. Others could be tucked under another piece at the last second, allowing for sophisticated horizontal play. Each new technique allowed him to stack more efficiently and avoid “topping out” early.

Jonas maxed out in 2001 or 2002 (the exact date is in question) and posted a picture of his TV screen in an online forum. It was the first time someone had offered proof of the feat, and came more than a decade after Thor Aackerlund, a legendary winner of the 1990 Tetris competition held at the Nintendo World Championships, was rumored to have maxed out. Some believed Jonas; others did not. “It’s possible,” Harrison remembers thinking at the time. “There is a reason to keep playing.” A few years later, he got in contact with Jonas, who had posted on a message board saying that he had recorded a max-out on V.H.S. Harrison helped transfer the footage so that it could be posted on the Web.

But Jonas’s reign didn’t go unchallenged. In the late two-thousands, other classic-Tetris players began submitting videos of their high scores to the Web site Twin Galaxies, which acted as an official record keeper. By 2009, Harry Hong, a spiky-haired twenty-four-year-old Angeleno, delivered the site’s first certified max-out, and Adam Cornelius, another Tetris enthusiast and a filmmaker, began working on a documentary about the remarkable achievement. When Harrison saw the project on Kickstarter, he donated a few hundred dollars to help complete the film, but added a caveat. “You can’t just talk about Harry Hong,” he recalls writing. “You’ve got to talk about Jonas Neubauer. You’ve got to talk about Thor Aackerlund. You’ve got to get these guys together and have a tournament and see who’s actually the best.” In response to similar feedback from other Tetris enthusiasts, Cornelius was inspired to make a full-length documentary. Some of the players who gathered for the first classic-Tetris tournament, for all their thousands of hours of practice, were in the dark about basic tactics. Hong was stunned to learn that his strategy of scoring Tetrises by dropping long bars into a left-side gap was suboptimal. Due to piece-flipping mechanics, a right-side gap was superior. Dana Wilcox, one of the highest-scoring players on the Twin Galaxies leaderboard, discovered that she’d played for twenty years without knowing that the blocks could be spun in either direction.

Jonas won the tournament, but the film’s focal points were the two biggest Tetris feats on display: the max-out and Level 30. At Level 29, the blocks, which are already falling at rates requiring near-instantaneous reactions, double in pace. Level 29 is known as the “kill screen” and seems intentionally impossible—a quick way for developers to end the game. To reach Level 30, a player must clear ten lines at this speed. In the movie’s final scene, Aackerlund achieves both a max-out and a Level 30 in the greatest game ever captured on tape.

Joseph Saelee, a fifteen-year-old from Visalia, California, watched the “Boom, Tetris for Jeff!” video after it was recommended to him by YouTube. The game was simple but mesmerizing; the announcing was silly but the energy contagious. He watched more Tetris matches: Jonas vs. Jeff, Jonas vs. Harry, Jonas vs. Koryan. (For the Tetris élite, last names are irrelevant.) After playing a few games on an online emulator, he decided to buy a Nintendo Entertainment System—a console more than double his age—and a 1989 classic-Tetris cartridge. “I’m not really sure what my mind-set was at the time,” he said. “I just knew I wanted to play it—like, for real, legit, you know?”

Learning to “hyper-tap” was a priority. Thor had been the first to hyper-tap, but, by 2017, Koji (Koryan) Nishio, a Japanese programmer in his forties, was the only prominent player using the technique. (“It seemed like a lot of work for a video game,” Vince Clemente, who has co-organized the classic-Tetris tournament since its inception, explained.) To Joseph, though, it was the obvious way to go. To tap quickly, he developed a unique one-handed grip: with his right thumb on the control pad, he flexed his right bicep until his arm shook, pressing down with each tremor, about fifteen times per second. He turned his thumb into a jackhammer.

In March of 2018, five months after he began playing classic Tetris, Joseph maxed out for the first time. By August, he had set the record for most lines cleared in a single game and posted the fastest times to three hundred thousand points and a hundred lines cleared. A couple weeks before the 2018 Classic Tetris World Championship, he became the first person to reach Level 31 on video, clearing twenty-eight lines after the kill screen. “Oh, my gosh,” he repeated in disbelief, hands on his head, “Level 31.” And Level 32 had been just two lines away. “Someone send this to Jonas,” a commenter wrote.

When Joseph arrived at the C.T.W.C., the top players—nearly all of them in their mid-thirties to early forties—recognized his face from his YouTube clips, but they didn’t know how competitive he’d be. Then the tournament started and Joseph kept advancing. “And it was just, like, ‘What’s happening? Why am I winning?’ ” he said. “It doesn’t make sense.” As he sat beside Jonas for the final match, Joseph displayed transparent emotions: disbelief after winning his first game, head-shaking agony during a long-bar drought, anxiety when fighting a points deficit with the kill screen approaching. When it hit him that he had defeated Jonas, he was left crying and speechless, forced to take a break from his interview as hundreds of attendees rose to give him a standing ovation. “I came into this tournament just to qualify,” Joseph said, tears running down his face. The announcer was stunned: “This may be the first champion we’ve ever seen wearing braces.”

Before the tournament, Joseph wasn’t sure how long he’d continue playing. “I guess I was just pretty average,” he said. “Average student, average trombone player, average percussionist. I just fit in easily, and it just wasn’t too hard.” Now he’d found something that he was actually good at. Days after the tournament ended, he hit a thousand subscribers on Twitch and YouTube. His Tetris streams became must-watch content for anyone even remotely interested in the game, a dazzling display of thumb agility and mind-body coordination. The first player to reach Level 31, he also became the first to reach Levels 32, 33, 34, and 35. Almost every video that he posted was a new world record, each stream a chance to see something happen for the first time.

“Jonas versus Joseph, I say, is essentially the revolution of classic Tetris,” Mykal (Sharky) Buster, a prominent player and commentator in the Tetris community, said, “because a sixteen-year-old kid showed the entire world that, hey, you don’t have to be playing this game for decades to be good.” The video of a teen-ager besting the seven-time champ surpassed “Boom, Tetris for Jeff!” in popularity on YouTube, and people across the country began scooping up retro gaming equipment and joining Tetris-obsessed enclaves on the Internet. Jonas quit his job to stream full-time on Twitch—broadcasting an efficient, battle-tested style for amateurs to emulate. When Joseph won the tournament again, in 2019, he inspired more young players. In 2020 alone, a hundred and thirty-one players maxed out; between 1990 and 2019, eighty-seven players had maxed out. Kids had killed the Tetris curve.

These new players see a max-out not as an impossibility, but as a rite of passage. Before even buying the game, most of the rising generation of classic-Tetris players have already watched hours of the best performances, hard-wiring beautiful stacking strategies. As they begin practicing, they often join one of many classic-Tetris servers on Discord, where hundreds of people are online all the time, ready to discuss any aspect of the game. It’s there that they often learn the most common hyper-tapping grip—holding the controller sideways, with the directional pad facing up—and how to properly tense the right arm so that it shakes quickly and consistently. They study the principles of developing a relatively even stack with a built-out left side, and discuss how dropping a pair of tetrominoes in a complementary orientation can reduce the need for a timely T-piece. They can imitate Joseph’s “hyper-tap quick-tap,” in which he sneaks in a left-handed tap among a right-thumb flurry, or watch Jonas’s “Tetris Spin Class” and observe how certain flips can clear a line and make the stack Tetris ready.

What took Jonas years to figure out takes new players minutes. “You don’t need to experiment for hours trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t,” Jacob Huff, a nineteen-year-old who maxed out last March after playing for two months, said. “You can ask someone in the Discord and they’ll tell you every spin that you can do.” Strategies born on Discord are practiced and scrutinized on Twitch, then put to the test in a growing pool of competitions: Classic Tetris Monthly, Classic Tetris League, Classic Tetris Gauntlet, Classic Tetris Brawl. Thanks to hyper-tapping and more efficient stacking, players build higher and higher, almost refusing to accept any line clearance that’s not a Tetris. To the older generation, the style seems reckless. To newer players, it’s simply the best way to play.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3ffYwjj