Neck and Neck

April 21, 2021 12:11 PM

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. From The Revolution in Classic Tetris [The New Yorker; archived version]

RIP Jonas Neubauer
BOOM! Tetris for Jeff
Play Classic Tetris
Classic Tetris on YouTube

Wait, what? NYX Professional Makeup Partners with Tetris

posted by chavenet (32 comments total)

I had a bad Tetris habit years ago. Can’t touch the stuff now.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:16 PM on April 21, 2021 [10 favorites]

Tetris was the one video game that I was really good at when I was a kid. I'd sometimes spend an entire afternoon with it, and resented that I never got to send my high scores in to Nintendo Power because my parents wouldn't let me "waste" a picture on their camera roll for a photo of a TV screen that might not even come out anyway.

Several years ago I got a jonesing to play again so I bought an old NES off eBay and went at it. After I got back in practice, I got to the point where I could VERY occasionally break 700,000. The gap between that and these folks who can max it out at 999,999 is MASSIVE.

So I'll never be a world-class player but I do still enjoy the occasional game.
posted by key lime guy at 12:32 PM on April 21, 2021 [5 favorites]

Oh man, seriously. There was a time in the early 90s when I was a Tetris god, thanks to quick, twitchy reflexes and a ridiculous amount of time immersed in the game.

But when you are dreaming Tetris and see the game behind your eyelids even in the daytime, and start to see tetromino patterns everywhere you go — in the grocery store, in a group of people, in the words on a page — you know you’re overdoing it.

I have to wonder, now, how much of my brain was hardwired by that experience thirty years ago to still perhaps affect certain neuron pathways today...
posted by darkstar at 12:34 PM on April 21, 2021 [7 favorites]

We had the Gameboy and, of course, Tetris as kids, and our stepdad didn't really touch video games- we'd try to get him to play Mario 3 with us and he'd run right into an enemy. So once we handed him our Gameboy and said hey, give Tetris a shot.

10 minutes later he hands it back with a score higher than anything we'd ever accomplished and explained that he'd had to destroy his install disk for the DOS version of Tetris because he found it difficult to get anything done that wasn't playing Tetris.
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:38 PM on April 21, 2021 [22 favorites]

Not only did I have to quit Tetris cold turkey I later had the same problem with Fringer. That guy, sheesh.
posted by clew at 12:39 PM on April 21, 2021 [3 favorites]

Late 80s memories. Our marching band went to play at Disney World. I sold band candy to raise money to pay for the trip. After we played our set, we had a couple days to see the park and ride the rides. After waiting an hour in line to get on Space Mountain, I said tata to friends, bought a Goofy hat, and blew $75 in quarters on Tetris in one of the arcades. This was back when quarters were valuable, unless you were part of the Francis Buxton-grade jet-set. Good times.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:49 PM on April 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

Interesting that they only go into Classic Tetris (which for some reason means NES). There are a lot of Tetris variants, each with their own fans. My son is big into Tetris Effect Connected and the zone mechanic, but some see innovation in the Tetris space as unwanted.

I read an article about the designer of Tetris back when Tetris99 came out, and he admitted to being a very mediochre Tetris player, which I thought was funny.
posted by rikschell at 12:52 PM on April 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

"Tetris 99 has taught me there is an entire roiling underbelly of god-tier Tetris degenerates out there that have been unknowingly training for this week their entire lives.

Having a good time watching Twitch streamers get destroyed by accounts named "Eileen" and "LuvMyKids72."" --IronSpike
posted by praemunire at 1:10 PM on April 21, 2021 [19 favorites]

I've never been very good at playing Tetris but when I play against my friends I'm fairly often able to get them to lose concentration and win that way. I call the way I play "cockroach style" meaning that I'm hard to kill. So they'll get me right near the top of the screen and every time they think they'll be able to send me lines and kill me I'm able to clear some lines and stay alive and eventually after sending me some lines and thinking they've killed me they don't pay attention and drop blocks in the wrong place and then end up dying themselves. I feel its similar to the way David Foster Wallace described his tennis playing as a youth. I'm sure if I played against actual good players they'd stay focused until they killed me, just like he got found out once the people he played against got better.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:12 PM on April 21, 2021 [3 favorites]

Also, it's funny that Twin Galaxies comes up here, after being riven by the dispute over Donkey Kong high scores.
posted by praemunire at 1:16 PM on April 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

Now I'm wondering how far I got in Tetris, as one of the original NES crowd. I know I never quite beat the challenge stages, but I had to have been getting to the kill level, because I remember the sudden super speed. I highly doubt that I was anywhere near maxing out the score though.
posted by Jacen at 1:43 PM on April 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

I think I’ll read this in the paper edition so I don’t find myself playing again - as much as I still like the game, I’m another person who can still involuntarily dream and daydream in Tetris after I’ve played for too long, and that’s no fun.
posted by Mchelly at 2:28 PM on April 21, 2021 [3 favorites]

I've really enjoyed watching some of the Tetris world championships. The game strikes a very fine balance between being very understandable and transparent in its goals and playstyle but having important, high level strategies and techniques. I can understand nearly everything that is happening in the highest level games and that gives me an appreciation of the skill that is being displayed even while I know that I cannot play at that level (rather, I am unwilling to dedicate the thousands of hours to reach a high level of play).
posted by ElKevbo at 2:28 PM on April 21, 2021 [3 favorites]

*whispers*

Tengen Tetris was better.
posted by delfin at 2:42 PM on April 21, 2021 [3 favorites]

Ooh, did anyone else ever have The Tetris Visions?

At one point, I was playing the game so often that I not only saw the pieces falling when I closed my eyes, but could actually "play" a game by envisioning it. And I wouldn't always "win" those games; I would make errors, rotate pieces, recover from big stack-ups, etc. Sometimes I had bad games in my mind. It was like the game software had been uploaded to my brain, and I could play just by closing my eyes.

Surely I'm not the only one ...?
posted by Dr. Wu at 3:52 PM on April 21, 2021 [9 favorites]

Surely I'm not the only one ...?

Not only are there other people in the comments here who have experienced it (including me) but the fantasy author Neil Gaiman wrote a short story / poem about it.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:06 PM on April 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

I have a Gameboy classic in the box! It boots up! The screen is dim though. That's my retirement grease, there.
posted by thelonius at 4:18 PM on April 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

Surely I'm not the only one ...?

I think this is in fact called "The Tetris Effect".
posted by thelonius at 4:23 PM on April 21, 2021 [6 favorites]

Clearly the inspiration for the TNG episode “The Game.”
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:44 PM on April 21, 2021 [3 favorites]

I think this is in fact called "The Tetris Effect".

Indeed; the most recent major single-player Tetris release was named after this phenomenon, and tried to couple the brain-rewiring effects of Tetris with striking, evocative imagery.

I think the most interesting version of high-level play is the Tetris: The Grand Master series of arcade releases. These have some very small tweaks to the official rules that make a big difference to high-level play (how pieces are generated is less predictable without having as many streaks or droughts). The game has a Grand Master mode that ranks your performance - we only know of six people in the world, so far, who've managed to achieve a Grand Master rank on the 2005 release. (In part because it's somewhat inaccessible, but also because it demands flawless play at incredible speeds over many minutes - and then expects you to keep it up with an invisible playing field.)
posted by Merus at 5:59 PM on April 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

Now I'm imagining Tetris as some big alien conspiracy, in which an extraterrestrial race used the game to re-wire the brains of a whole generation of humans. Perhaps to make us think more rationally. (Hah!) Or to condition us to be happy when their tetromino-shaped ships land on our planet in neat, orderly lines.

Hey, they had to do something to wipe the "Space Invaders" conditioning...
posted by darkstar at 7:05 PM on April 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

Ooh, did anyone else ever have The Tetris Visions?

I once played Tetris for 13 consecutive hours and then almost had a stroke when I tried to go to the can and the tiled walls and floor wouldn’t stop moving and I couldn’t get out.
posted by mhoye at 9:34 PM on April 21, 2021 [10 favorites]

I have a Gameboy classic in the box! It boots up! The screen is dim though.

The contrast wheel doesn't fix that? How good are you with a little solder repair?
posted by stopgap at 4:19 AM on April 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

Well I HAVE a soldering iron
posted by thelonius at 4:30 AM on April 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

How a younger generation used the Internet to master the falling blocks.
"...When you were having premarital sex, I mastered the falling blocks."

how far I got in Tetris
On the Gameboy, I got to the rocket ship screen.
posted by thelonius at 5:26 AM on April 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

Now I'm imagining Tetris as some big alien conspiracy, in which an extraterrestrial race used the game to re-wire the brains of a whole generation of humans.

Back in college, when all we had was the black and white version with the Russian music, we used to call it the first post- Cold War Soviet weapon, insidiously taking over our minds and keeping us from being able to focus on studying anything.

But on the flip side (and apologies if it’s in TFA, which I haven’t gotten to yet because I read the paper issue slowly and in order probably because the Soviets stunted my brain in my youth), the Tetris effect seems to be an effective treatment for PTSD
posted by Mchelly at 7:08 AM on April 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

I made an entire OS that only runs Tetris
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 8:24 AM on April 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

I taught myself programming during a period when my actual job involved about an hour of work per day. So for seven or eight hours a day I was immersed in learning how to code. For a period I'd experience this pining sensation of wishing objects in the physical world were as manipulatable as objects in the Ruby I was writing. Describing the sensation to my wife, I said it was the first time I'd felt that sort of perceptual/cognitive reality overlay since my Tetris-playing days, many years earlier. (I remember the CGA version on a 286, but got the Tetris Effect from my first-gen Gameboy.)
posted by mph at 9:38 AM on April 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

Somewhere I heard Tetris described as the most Russian of games: you don't try to win, you just try to keep from losing for as long as possible.
posted by gottabefunky at 10:55 AM on April 22, 2021 [8 favorites]

I've taken to enjoying Tetris 99 on Nintendo Switch Online, but I can really only stand to play one game in a sitting, because it is the very definition of a five-minute panic attack, and I'm sure that every single game I play takes a month off my life.
posted by General Malaise at 11:36 AM on April 22, 2021

Damn you NYX I really want those eyeliners and I almost never wear makeup. But! The nostalgia!
posted by Mizu at 11:34 PM on April 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

I flunked out of a private engineering college with a full scholarship in 1989, 50% because of Tetris and 50% because of beer. Have you ever dreamt in Tetris?
posted by bendy at 6:06 AM on April 23, 2021 [1 favorite]