Classic Tetris® World Championship: the Ultimate Test of Mental and Physical Acuteness

Tetris. A game we all know and love. Some dub it the ‘Perfect Game’ and for good reason. Created in 1984 in the USSR by Alexey Pajitnov, it quickly took the world by storm with its addictive yet deceptively simple gameplay. Selling over 170 million copies to date, the general concept has remained the same: one of seven tetrominoes falls from the top of the screen, you can rotate it in any direction but once it hits the floor it is stuck in place. Do this repeatedly with the aim of filling an entire row… once you fill a row, that row is deleted. Keep going until you mess up and the whole screen is filled to the top!

Relatively simple right? Well, it is harder than you might think, and with increasing levels of speed as the game goes on you will find that there is a huge disparity between skilled players and newbies. With seemingly no limit to the skill cap of this game, many hardcore players have turned to create a competitive scene out of the game.

CTWC

The Classic Tetris World Championship is hosted every year at the Portland Gaming Expo and is taking place this weekend from the 18th – 20th October. The competition launched in 2010 during the filming of Ecstacy of Order: The Tetris Masters (A great documentary that I would highly recommend) to determine the ‘World’s Greatest Tetris Player’. To standardise the playing field, everybody plays on the original NES version of the game from 1989. An old Nintendo World Championship competitor of Tetris, Trey Harrison, created specific code so that in 1v1 situations both competitors would receive the random selection of blocks in the same order to eliminate the luck factor involved. With these rules set in place, it allows for a very professional atmosphere and unique playstyles to shine, whether it be the ‘centre well’ antics of Thor Aackerlund or the extreme ‘hyper-tapping’ of last year’s champion Joseph Saelee.

In the 9 years the tournament has been running, Jonas Neubauer (the first-ever champion) has been the dominant force. Winning 7 out of 9 and being in every final, he is without a doubt the GOAT of Classic Tetris. The history of the years he did not win are extremely interesting and pave the way for understanding why CTWC 2019 might be the craziest year yet!

Harry vs. Jonas

Even before the first CTWC, Jonas and Harry were rivals. In 2009, Harry Hong became the first known player to achieve the highest possible score, 999,999 dubbed a ‘max-out’. The reason it is so hard to achieve this score is not only the extreme skill required to stay alive long enough, but also the game reaches a ‘kill-screen’ at level 29 where the pieces fall too fast to be able to play. This means you are effectively on a time limit to reach the highest score you possibly can. Harry and Jonas were both going for the max-out when it was first achieved, making the 2010 CTWC effectively a grudge match between the two. Jonas pulled off a win in the finals, exacting his revenge over Harry. This dominance over Harry would continue, winning every following CTWC until 2014. Master Hong was on fire this year, easily taking a 3-1 victory over Jonas and downing the Titan. Unfortunately, since 2014 Harry has not seen anywhere near the same level of success. The Virtuoso

Other than 2014, Jonas continued to see unparalleled success in the world of Tetris, achieving multiple world records in different categories and consistently winning major tournaments. However, in early 2018 a young 16-year old boy from California began to rise to fame due to his ability to play past the level 29 kill-screen. The way he does this is by utilising a technique called ‘hyper-tapping’. Hyper-tapping is as it sounds – tapping insanely fast – by vibrating the controller between your thumb and the rest of your hand. This means that you can move the piece far faster than the traditional method of simply holding down a direction and thus, if your brain works fast enough, you can continue to play past level 29 and beyond. To date, his record is level 34, a completely unprecedented realm that no one else has even come close to achieving. In the same year that Joseph first appeared, he completely shocked the Tetris world by stealing the limelight from Jonas and being the 3rd ever CTWC champion; his victory was so dominant that Jonas was unable to take a single game from Joseph. Since then Joseph has continued the same spell of dominance shown by Jonas in years prior, taking world record after world record and innovating like no other before him.

This Year

Unlike in previous years, the outcome of this World Championship is truly unpredictable. Many pros expect Joseph to take back to back victories, but the consistency of Jonas over the last decade cannot be pushed under the rug – the man knows how to deal with pressure on the big stage. Other prominent players are in the running: Koryan, a long-time player from Japan who also utilises hyper-tapping has been getting closer and closer to winning, reaching 4th place in both 2016 and 2018. Moreover, meme-famous Jeff Moore (TETRIS FOR JEFF) who came in 2nd place in 2016 is making his return this year. With a huge line-up of highly regarded players, who knows what is going to happen?

If you are interested in checking it out be sure to watch the CTWC Twitch channel this weekend to find out who’s going to take home the beautiful T-Block trophy!