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16-Year-Old Dethrones Tetris World Champion With Difficult Hyper-Tap Technique (kotaku.com)
Over the weekend, seven-time winner Jonas Neubauer showed up at the Classic Tetris World Championship in Portland, Oregon like he has every year since it moved there in 2011. Instead of adding another championship to his name, he finished in second place this time, bested by 16-year-old Joseph Saelee who went on an amazing three-game tear. From a report: "The kid played with pure heart, the most clutch Tetris that we've seen from anyone," Neubauer said after the dust had settled. "He just really had the ability, had the natural ability, and let it shine as bright as he could in his first tournament. [It's] truly an honor to pass the torch to the new generation of Tetris players." The veteran stood on stage holding a silver trophy, his first since losing to Harry Hong in 2014, and the unlikely Saelee, tears still in his eyes, hoisted the gold to applause from the crowd at Sunday's Retro Game Expo crowd.
Though Tetris came out on the NES in 1989, the Classic World Championship tournament as it exists today didn't get started until 2010 after the game's competitive scene spent most of the aughts trading strategies, high scores, and footage evidence throughout a scattered network of forums and websites. Now, top players from around the world compete annually at the Expo using the original game and controllers played on old CRTs to see who can get the highest score in individual head-to-head matchups.
Though Tetris came out on the NES in 1989, the Classic World Championship tournament as it exists today didn't get started until 2010 after the game's competitive scene spent most of the aughts trading strategies, high scores, and footage evidence throughout a scattered network of forums and websites. Now, top players from around the world compete annually at the Expo using the original game and controllers played on old CRTs to see who can get the highest score in individual head-to-head matchups.
Since the summary didn't bother to mention what the "hyper-tapping" technique from the headline is, here's the explanation from the article:
Unlike many other top players, including Neubauer, Saelee uses hyper-tapping, a technique that requires players to press the D-pad rapidly at the the correct intervals in order to move Tetris pieces in different directions without losing speed. Normally players just hold down left or right on the D-pad. Saeleeâ(TM)s strategy on the other hand requires more than 10 button presses a second to be effective. Itâ(TM)s a riskier and more demanding style of play, but one that ended up paying off.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
The game itself actually gets pretty monotonous once you reach max speed
That's why modern Tetris has a much higher max speed than classic Tetris. Could you keep up with Shirase mode in Tetris The Grand Master 3: Terror-Instinct ? It starts fast, where pieces land immediately on the stack giving you a split second to shift them into place, and only gets faster from there.
TGM is fundamentally different from NES Tetris. They might as well be different games. The most important difference is something called 'lock delay' which is how long it takes a piece to 'lock' in to position once it reaches the top of the stack. It's very generous in TGM (30 frames). In NES Tetris, lock delay (I believe) is limited to the time it takes for the piece to fall to another row. Modern "guidelines" Tetris is similar to TGM, though it's far more generous in that it allows you to 'reset' the lock counter on a successful shift or rotation, rather that just on a drop.
This means that you can play modern Tetris and TGM at much higher speeds than NES Tetris. At 20g speeds, pieces don't fall from the top so much as they appear at the top of the stack. In NES Tetris, that would make the game unplayable as you couldn't move the pieces at all! In TGM, 20g speed is perfectly playable as you have an abundance of time (a full half-second) to shift and rotate your piece. By preloading DAS during ARE, you don't even need that long. Strong players will press down to instantly lock their piece once it's in place, saving time.
The minimal lock delay makes NES Tetris very difficult to play. Pieces feel like they're 'sticky'. It takes a lot more speed and precision to play at a high level than the seemingly 'faster' TGM and modern Tetris games you might have seen. I've played TGM for less than a year and I'm an S9 player. I've been playing NES Tetris longer than I can remember, but my best scores are just over 200k.
Joseph Saelee's play is nothing short of remarkable. It's 'next level' play. 4-minute-mile stuff.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Isn't this just a "solved game" already?
Classic Tetris isn't solved, but modern Tetris (since 2001) is, as colour_thief and I proved back in 2007. Someone made a video of the solution.
Why "still"?