Enjoyable article! I don't play NES Tetris so much but I do play Nullpomino. I only do the 40-line clear race. 38 seconds is my best so far but I'm a long way from the WR.
Holy cow, I just looked up the current record, and it was actually set today! MicroBlizz says in this video description (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzUUKKuye24) that he finished a game in 20.28 seconds. It will be neat to see who is the first sub 20! (MicroBlizz or Lapsilap).
I understand you're in the "Tetris world". I'm also interested in starting to play Tetris more seriously, but am not sure where on the internet all the Tetris people hang out. Got any pointers for me?
Wow, the writing of this article is superb. I never quite got into the super competitiveness of gaming myself (for record breaking and etc) but the story alone has intrigued me as well as let me take a glance inside the lives of the players. I don't really know what else to say but the way the article is written was truly engaging.
Thank you! Writing the article, I was struck by a few constant themes: everyone in this community is VERY NICE, they are VERY COMPETITIVE, and the game is BRUTAL. The game itself is punishingly hard.
To me, the central revelation was that the game was so fatalistic that only nice people could survive it. And when those people get together to play each other, it's a huge party. I wanted to tell a human story about people who just happen to be extremely good at Tetris.
I did ten years of work. I'm in a CIA prison. A job would be a CIA joke. Fuck them and die! God's gonaa FUCK YOU UP!
gOD SAYS...
C:\Text\BIBLE.TXT
fill to her
double.
18:7 How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so
much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a
queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.
18:8 Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning,
and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is
the Lord God who judgeth her.
18:9 And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and
lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and l
When I play too much tetris I start thinking about the blocks all the time and find it maddening. I wonder if these guys can ever stop thinking about the blocks or if it just becomes so hard-wired in their brain that they lose consciousness of it.
There is a well documented thing called the Tetris Effect, where you see the blocks in dreams or when your eyes close. There's been some neuro research on it. When I asked these guys about it, they said they got past it after a while. They all say, yes, I have experienced Tetris Effect stuff, but at some point the brain seems to filter it out.
My impression is that these players are spending a lot of their conscious energy on the next-piece box, constructing the stack, and just staying calm. I think the majority of what they're doing is near instinct at this point, since they play so much, they just kinda "know" the right move for any given situation. Or at least, most of them. A max out game is a combination of random luck and extreme skill/practice.
The documentary "Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters" (steaming free on Hulu) has more on all of this. Disclosure: I wrote parts of that film. Ben Mullen is one of the main subjects of the film.
I think this extends to any video game or virtual world you spend a lot of time in. There have been periods in my life when I dreamed about healing party members, and when I catch myself instinctively checking nearby rooftops for snipers.
Either that, or I have officially lost it. (Or both; they are not mutually exclusive...)
I didn't check the roof for snipers, but I had nightmares of heavy cavalry charging at me in the open field while I was one of the poor underequipped peasants. That's what Total War games can do to you :) BTW - a heavy cavalry charge is very scary, I don't recommend standing in its way.
>When I asked these guys about it, they said they got past it after a while. They all say, yes, I have experienced Tetris Effect stuff, but at some point the brain seems to filter it out.
That corresponds with my experience with the Tetris Effect from other games. I used to play a ton of DDR, and initially experienced the same phenomenon (as I've mentioned in a past comment, I took the SAT the day after buying and playing it all night, resulting in the fascinating experience of seeing DDR arrows superimposed over an SAT scantron). I was pretty heavily addicted to the game for a long time, but eventually the phantom arrows simply went away.
I can't say much about Tetris Effect, but I think this happens in various fields.
- When I studied Descriptive Geometry I started seems projections everywhere I looked.
- When I was doing research and development on procedural buildings, shapes appeared whenever I looked at real buildings.
- When I was studying graph theory (and I basically drawn everything to help me remember) I could see blobs appearing on the tv screen for random shapes.
A slightly more modern anecdote: I've played most of Konami's music arcade and console games regularly (e.g. Beatmania IIDX, Drummania) ever since I started middle school. The learning curve was relatively huge for me and it took a while to have build up enough dexterity and speed for the hardest difficulties. Fast forwarding to the present time, it's hard for me to consciously _think_ about the notes anymore. Doing so just causes my accuracy to drop drastically and/or cause me to lose all focus.
When I was playing Doom as a kid, I typically played in the evening. Next morning after the night of sleep I felt like I was playing all night, at the moment I woke up I could swear I was just shooting at monsters a moment ago.
I used to play TwinTris on the Amiga a lot: one the best version of Twintris ever (there are several videos on YouTube showing it). Very smooth 50 frames per second "pixel perfect" animation (but that doesn't translate very well in a YouTube video) and an amazing soundtrack.
But I was "too good" at it: there were vertical bars showing how many of each piece got randomly selected and these bars would grow higher and higher as you were playing.
I was playing for so long, even when the game reached crazy speed, that the bar would arrive at the top of the screen and then come back down, a bit shifted. A major video memory corruption would follow and it was only getting worse and worse.
At one point it became impossible to correctly see the screen and you had "lost" to the display bug.
This article doesn't go at all into the details of why NES Tetris is unwinnable and doomed to fail. Let me plug that gap.
The brick wall limitation comes at level 29, after 290 lines. At that time, the pieces drop so fast that they cannot reach the sides of the well before locking into place. The code rate-limits sideways moves of a piece to about 250 ms intervals, so if the game is running fast enough that the piece reaches bottom in less than a second, it's impossible to translate the piece five columns over to the edge. It's not a human limitation; it's literally impossible to keep playing even going frame-by-frame on an emulator. To go beyond 290 lines (or 293 if the 290th was the first of a Tetris), you'd have to stack up pieces on the sides ahead of time, and the absolute limit is about 310.
Modern Tetris games are very carefully designed to avoid such limitations. Modern Tetris games always allow at least a half second after a piece lands before locking it, allowing further moves and rotations. http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Tetris_Guideline
So the game of NES Tetris becomes not how long you can survive, but how many points per line you can score in that fixed duration of 290 lines. If every single line of the 290 was a Tetris, the total would come to about 1,500,000. So to reach the game's score cap of 999,999, about two-thirds of your lines must be achieved as Tetrises.
Gameboy Tetris has no such impassable speed tier. You can play Gameboy Tetris forever and many players have scored 400+ lines and 999,999 there.
I wonder what the people in the article think about tetris friends and if any of them play on there. I used to play that a lot, but hit a barrier and was never able to get past my high score of 728,514.
"I never played for score, only for meditation. :)
I remember passing level 29 on two or three occasions, always a freak happening. I can't find a video online of anyone doing this without tool-assist though." - a friend of mine, who is really, really rainman-good at NES Tetris.
The subject of Level 30 is discussed in great depth in "Ecstasy of Order." Without spoiling anything, let's just say Thor is the guy to watch. There is a bonus feature on the DVD that might interest you.
32 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 80.6 ms ] threadHoly cow, I just looked up the current record, and it was actually set today! MicroBlizz says in this video description (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzUUKKuye24) that he finished a game in 20.28 seconds. It will be neat to see who is the first sub 20! (MicroBlizz or Lapsilap).
I understand you're in the "Tetris world". I'm also interested in starting to play Tetris more seriously, but am not sure where on the internet all the Tetris people hang out. Got any pointers for me?
To me, the central revelation was that the game was so fatalistic that only nice people could survive it. And when those people get together to play each other, it's a huge party. I wanted to tell a human story about people who just happen to be extremely good at Tetris.
That sly Marco may have another hit on his hands.
gOD SAYS... C:\Text\BIBLE.TXT
fill to her double.
18:7 How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.
18:8 Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her.
18:9 And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and l
My impression is that these players are spending a lot of their conscious energy on the next-piece box, constructing the stack, and just staying calm. I think the majority of what they're doing is near instinct at this point, since they play so much, they just kinda "know" the right move for any given situation. Or at least, most of them. A max out game is a combination of random luck and extreme skill/practice.
The documentary "Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters" (steaming free on Hulu) has more on all of this. Disclosure: I wrote parts of that film. Ben Mullen is one of the main subjects of the film.
Either that, or I have officially lost it. (Or both; they are not mutually exclusive...)
That corresponds with my experience with the Tetris Effect from other games. I used to play a ton of DDR, and initially experienced the same phenomenon (as I've mentioned in a past comment, I took the SAT the day after buying and playing it all night, resulting in the fascinating experience of seeing DDR arrows superimposed over an SAT scantron). I was pretty heavily addicted to the game for a long time, but eventually the phantom arrows simply went away.
- When I studied Descriptive Geometry I started seems projections everywhere I looked.
- When I was doing research and development on procedural buildings, shapes appeared whenever I looked at real buildings.
- When I was studying graph theory (and I basically drawn everything to help me remember) I could see blobs appearing on the tv screen for random shapes.
But I was "too good" at it: there were vertical bars showing how many of each piece got randomly selected and these bars would grow higher and higher as you were playing.
I was playing for so long, even when the game reached crazy speed, that the bar would arrive at the top of the screen and then come back down, a bit shifted. A major video memory corruption would follow and it was only getting worse and worse.
At one point it became impossible to correctly see the screen and you had "lost" to the display bug.
: )
The brick wall limitation comes at level 29, after 290 lines. At that time, the pieces drop so fast that they cannot reach the sides of the well before locking into place. The code rate-limits sideways moves of a piece to about 250 ms intervals, so if the game is running fast enough that the piece reaches bottom in less than a second, it's impossible to translate the piece five columns over to the edge. It's not a human limitation; it's literally impossible to keep playing even going frame-by-frame on an emulator. To go beyond 290 lines (or 293 if the 290th was the first of a Tetris), you'd have to stack up pieces on the sides ahead of time, and the absolute limit is about 310.
Modern Tetris games are very carefully designed to avoid such limitations. Modern Tetris games always allow at least a half second after a piece lands before locking it, allowing further moves and rotations. http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Tetris_Guideline
So the game of NES Tetris becomes not how long you can survive, but how many points per line you can score in that fixed duration of 290 lines. If every single line of the 290 was a Tetris, the total would come to about 1,500,000. So to reach the game's score cap of 999,999, about two-thirds of your lines must be achieved as Tetrises.
Gameboy Tetris has no such impassable speed tier. You can play Gameboy Tetris forever and many players have scored 400+ lines and 999,999 there.
Reminds me of that quote from Billy Madison, "...we are now dumber for having read it...and may god have mercy on your soul!"
And the sport will die when we run out of functioning NES consoles and CRTs.
I remember passing level 29 on two or three occasions, always a freak happening. I can't find a video online of anyone doing this without tool-assist though." - a friend of mine, who is really, really rainman-good at NES Tetris.