Teens are rewriting what is possible in the world of competitive Tetris

Nice to see some Tetris news here! I've been a little obsessed lately with Tetr.io. For those who don't know it, it's a version of tetris where you can play against other players and send them pieces when, for example, you do a tetris or a combo. It's pretty impressive to watch the competitions : https://youtu.be/A4SFWfXZsks

herman_toothrot• 4 years ago

Pretty cool. Anyone remember TetriNET from the 90s? Similar concept, except there were special pieces mixed in that you could use on opponents or yourself (add line, clear line, quake, etc.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TetriNET

cjbprime• 4 years ago

Yup! I remember the Debian developers would often play it together, I suppose because it was one of a small number of exciting open source multiplayer games which worked on Linux.

contingencies• 4 years ago

IMHO when people discuss networked Tetris, it's now the reference implementation.

bcherny• 4 years ago

Ah, sounds similar to PuzzleFighter, an older Japanese game.

nope96• 4 years ago

Found out about Tetr.io from this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29728892

Instantly got addicted, and I was amazed to see how good everyone is. 14 year old me with my gameboy would have been stunned at how fast and crazy modern Tetris is. And multi-national! Love it, but had to give it up after a few months because it seemed like it would/or was causing my longstanding RSI to come back.

EddySchauHai2• 4 years ago

There’s a battle royale version of Tetris on the switch that sounds very similar - you can alter your settings of who you attack too, targeting those who attacked you, those in the lead, etc… I never won but got top 3 a couple times :)

synergy202• 4 years ago

My son was obsessed with this for a while and is probably ranked top 20 globally, what's the excitement of this game is beyond me. That ended up hurting his college application quite a bit, and he showed no regret and is still in love with it.

The only thing positive I see is that they actually have a closed circle from different nations, so he made some "online friends" there.

DavidSJ5• 4 years ago

Why the scare quotes around online friends? Online friends are very real friends.

slothtrop5• 4 years ago

Because they're no substitute for friends you see in person.

baby• 4 years ago

I personally had a shaky scholarity due to playing video games too much. No regret either. I’ve ended up in a pretty good spot and have a lot of memories making friends and being competitive at something

charcircuit• 4 years ago

what's the excitement of this game is beyond me

It's the same excitement as speedrunning if that helps you get it. Having a community where you are all trying to get better at something while having fun doing so.

jgtrosh2• 4 years ago

It's one of the most wholesome gaming communities out there, where achievements are celebrated and all ages get to empathize on this pure experience.

It shouldn't replace irl friends, but there are much worse online friends to have than Classic Tetris players.

brailsafe3• 4 years ago

I guess you might have missed the "are ya winnin son?" meme from a few years ago. Life isn't about the college you get into. Being in the top 20 of tetris players is going to be very rewarding, and they can go to college later if they want

bergenty2• 4 years ago

Is is though? What’s the point. You’re in front of a screen during the best years of your life attempting to get good at something that is at the end of it trivial from a lot of perspectives. It’s kind of indistinguishable from smoking pot and sitting in front of your TV.

That being said, I’ve followed the scene for 6 years and always found it very interesting to watch.

paulcole• 4 years ago

Being in the top 20 of tetris players is going to be very rewarding

I was a pretty high-level Scrabble player, devoting a handful of years of my life to it, and it’s one of the biggest regrets I have. Total waste of time and only a attempt to ignore the other things I hated about my life.

Aperocky• 4 years ago

showed no regret and is still in love with it.

Good for him for finding the experience that he enjoys when he's young.

faeriechangling• 4 years ago

I respect a top 20 Tetris player more than I respect a college graduate since the college graduate just has to convince the teachers to like him and do exactly as he's told compliantly. The Tetris player has to be the best at something difficult and competitive that shows intelligence.

Can hardly blame your son for not taking something seriously which is mostly taken seriously because everybody thinks that everybody else takes it seriously and you can't just opt out of impressing others because it will limit what you can do and earn in the future. College itself is just a glorified game but a far more boring and unfair one than Tetris.

synergy202• 4 years ago

after reading the comments I found another thing that is unexpected but related, he has been trying to write a program beating Tetris since high school, from initial python to AI. He was competitive on math(ranked in top 30 nationally at HMMT at 9th grade), so his missing out tier1 school(e.g. MIT) disappointed me a bit, but it's what it is. On the other hand I had a MIT PhD colleague who graduated 11 years ago and is a senior software engineer just like the rest of other colleges' graduates. I guess school does not define everything(no offense).

DanielVZ• 4 years ago

Believe it or not he's learning a ton of soft skills that college fails to teach that are paramount for real life success. During college I "wasted" my time playing videogames, speedrunning, striving for high scores, and forming communities. I graduated with sub par scores but I still managed to be more successful than any of my college buddies (even those with perfect grades).

Here are some ways it helped me kickstart my self taught software engineering carreer:

- I learned how to enter the zone almost on command. I recognized my triggers and exploited them.

- I learned how to moderate a community. Now I see the fruits of that because somehow in the two companies I've worked at I've been seen as a leader even when I was a junior developer.

- I learned that learning stuff wasn't really that hard. It mostly requires dedication. I memorized speedrunning routes from google doc files for several games and it translates well into the experience I've had of reading documentation to learn a tool.

- I perfected my English. As a non-native speaker, practicing English with natives gave me the tools to now work for companies abroad that are astronomically better than local ones in every conceivable way.

I'm sure there are other benefits as well. There are also some risks such as social isolation, but that really depends on the player's surroundings more than anything.

danso• 4 years ago

I saw this Polygon story on reddit, and deep in the reddit comments was a link to this fascinating 9-minute YouTube video that explains the latest NES Tetris competitive tech which is apparently "faster than hypertapping!" (I did not know even know what "hypertapping" was)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-BZ5-Q48lE

tedunangst3• 4 years ago

For me, there's an open question whether games like Tetris should have such hacks. (Is it a bug that should be fixed?) Obviously reaction time is a factor in a game that continuously speeds up to increase difficulty, but should inhuman button mashing offer an advantage over auto repeat? You can't make Mario run 20x faster by hyper tapping the run key.

boomboomsubban4• 4 years ago

I can see why one would take issue with hypertapping, a method which seemed to require some inherent body ability to be capable of, but rolling is merely a more efficient method of human tapping. It's like asking if the fosbury flop should be allowed.

hypertele-Xii• 4 years ago

You can make Mario 20x faster by tapping backwards longjump on stairs, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKf_bFNXuu8

LocalH• 4 years ago

That’s like asking if Guitar Hero should have tapping, where you bring your strumming hand up to press fret buttons. Speed techniques that work with unmodified hardware and game code should almost always be allowed.

GoldenRacer• 4 years ago

I don't feel it's a hack. DAS is a mechanism of the game that was intended to aid players and make the game play more enjoyable for the typical player.

If users want to forgo that mechanism why shouldn't they be allowed? If I'm in a typing competition and am typing a word with a repeated letter such as the two l's in "all", you would never expect me to have to press the l key and wait for the computer to automatically type a second l until I released. You'd expect me to just press the l key twice because it's faster and that wouldn't be considered a "hack". Why would you expect anything different for Tetris players?

As for Mario, it's just a slightly more realistic game in terms of you controlling a set of pixels that represent a person instead of blocks. Mario doesn't move from one column to the next, he smoothly travels through all the pixels between columns because people in the real world move smoothly. Tetris blocks aren't real world objects though so they can move one column at a time. If it only takes one frame for a block to move one column, why shouldn't I be able to move the block one column every frame?

Also, in the official game, if you use DAS you move at 10Hz (moving once every 6 frames). It looks like top players can tap at around 20Hz. That's only 2x faster.

dcow• 4 years ago

I dont think you’re abstractly asking a silly question. People do debate whether in-game emergent behavior that leverages obviously unintended game mechanics is allowable all the time. But the analog for Tetris here would be something like “if you press input so fast it overflows some counter and gives you free rows”. That’s not what this is. There is no “hack”. This is skill.

yayachiken• 4 years ago

The competitive scene is probably also influenced from the speedrun community. And the speedrun community has really worked out the kinks in their ruleset, as in most games, you need to find the sweet-spot of allowing hacks and innovative techniques to break the game, but not too much that it becomes uninteresting.

For example, in Super Mario Brothers non-TAS runs, the rules are based around the controller and execution environment. You are not allowed to modify the controller or tilt the cartridge, but that's it.

Having the rules only limit the tools required, just like in sports, is quite elegant. If somebody figured a way to play faster with their teeth, it would be allowed, and rolling the controller is just something like that.

On the other hand, people found out that you can perform certain feats in SMB by pressing the left and right button at the same time. This is considered impossible with the standard D-Pad (without e.g. cutting it in the middle), so that is banned. At least until somebody figures out a way how to do it with the standard D-Pad.

stormbrew3• 4 years ago

Aside from "what is too much" questions, skipping DAS in the nes version of Tetris by tapping is something almost anyone who plays the game will do if they play it long enough and isn't at all unintended behavior. It just makes sense for certain situations.

And while it's not true for most 2d platformers of smb's era, performing repetative button actions to move faster than the standard acceleration curve allows became very possible in 16bit games and a later, and you'll see those used in speedruns all the time. Usually a repeated dash, but sometimes weird stuff like running backwards, jumping in certain ways (smb actually has one of these), or rhythmically pumping the shoulder buttons.

userbinator2• 4 years ago

I'm not at all a gamer, but can type decently fast and see much similarity between the "rolling" technique and using all 10 fingers on the keyboard --- e.g. 120WPM is a rate of 10 keys per second, which is extremely difficult to do even with a single finger on one key, but spreading the energy across all the fingers makes it much easier to achieve those speeds. Incidentally, the fastest typers don't use a rigid key-to-finger mapping for ths reason too; they tend to use the closest finger that's available.

CarVac• 4 years ago

Incidentally, the fastest typers don't use a rigid key-to-finger mapping for ths reason too; they tend to use the closest finger that's available.

Only on QWERTY. On Dvorak there's a very rigid mapping and it very evenly uses all the fingers.

Personally, the ability to distribute the load more is why I prefer the number row over a number pad when typing numbers; though Dvorak helps there by putting the punctuation closer to the number row.

And on my ergonomic keyboard I have the numbers on the home row in the number layer, rather than in a numpad layout.

lern_too_spel• 4 years ago

This Polygon story explains what hypertapping is and what rolling is. There is no need to go deep in the Reddit comments to find out.

woojoo666• 4 years ago

I still recommend watching the video though. It's like the Polygon article but more audiovisual, and shows what hypertapping and rolling actually look like, and the development of rolling

drexlspivey• 4 years ago

This video has been posted here 3 times (one by me) with no votes/comments

dreamoffire• 4 years ago

Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose and sometimes it rains

spike021• 4 years ago

Anyone have a preferred method of playing Tetris?

These days I just load up the official site's web version [0] but lately they've crammed more and more ads onto the page and Ublock Origin can't keep up. Sometimes the tab totally freezes. Makes it difficult to enjoy.

[0] https://tetris.com/play-tetris

goosedragons• 4 years ago

My favorite version is Puyo Puyo Tetris. It's on Steam, Switch, PS4, Xbox. Also a Puyo Puyo game but you can easily just play Tetris if you want. It's fun, it's colorful. Also has multiplayer, online and split screen. No ads but you do have to buy it for $20.

After that it's probably classic Game Boy Tetris.

EddySchauHai2• 4 years ago

Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 is also out! I believe it has more players online.

Shared404• 4 years ago

Gameboy/NES emulator is probably a reasonable option.

I have a keychain toy I got as a child that has a cheap LCD recreation.

<strike>clearly the best option is bastet on linux</strike>

jgtrosh2• 4 years ago

Either Nintendo Tetris on NES if I'm at home or Tetris Effect Connected's Classic mode. Here's a good enough online emulator: https://arcadespot.com/game/classic-tetris/

For modern Tetris, Tetr.io or jstris.

Comkid• 4 years ago

My favourite is tetr.js which is open source and has seen multiple forks over the years.

The latest I’m aware of is [0].

[0] https://doktorocelot.com/tetr.js/

userbinator2• 4 years ago

You could play a version that you wrote yourself...

It's actually not that difficult --- it's probably one of the most cloned/ported puzzle games, but almost always called something other than Tetris because their lawyers really don't want you using that name. "Russia Block" is/was a relatively common synonym.

chongli• 4 years ago

It’s easy if you just want to get the basic game up and running. If you want an authentic experience, however, then you need to put in more work to replicate the quirks of the NES original (the version used for CTWC). There’s everything from the NES’s 60.0988 frames per second to the Nintendo rotation system, delayed auto shift, soft drop speed, to the random piece generator (which is biased against line pieces). There’s also the scoring rules, gravity level progression, and more.

The game mechanics are actually quite complex when you include all of the details. Sure, you might say those details are superfluous, but there’s a reason many people prefer classic Tetris over more recent versions. Nintendo’s original mechanics are much more challenging but also very satisfying to play with.

jamal-kumar• 4 years ago

My favorite is a variation called first-person tetris:

https://www.firstpersontetris.com/

It's fun to give someone without telling them the whole view rotates whenever you rotate the piece because it's extremely disorienting if you're not used to it, but after a bit of practice it becomes easy

moozilla2• 4 years ago

https://tetr.io/ is probably the best unofficial game, especially if you're into multiplayer variants.

For single player https://jstris.jezevec10.com/ or https://simon.lc/tetr.js/ are the best.

Siilwyn• 4 years ago

I like to play on Flatris: https://flatris.space/

Ekaros3• 4 years ago

I found this version bit fun. Goal and more tactic driven. Also short games don't tire out too much. https://tetris.com/play-tetrisgems

boomboomsubban4• 4 years ago

Is the method more taxing on the controller? How do such NES events handle controllers? Are modern remakes allowed, do they disassemble and fix them, or is there a fear that eventually all NES controllers will be broken forcing change?

tedunangst3• 4 years ago

The G forces are pretty minimal. Also, replica controllers are permitted. You can play with a lefty controller that swaps AB and D-pad for instance.

a_t48• 4 years ago

You will eventually wear out the pads. Happens with SNES controllers after heavy kaizo play. :)

StanislavPetrov2• 4 years ago

Truly amazing to see this new generation of Tetris play.

On a semi-related note, this article stirred some nostalgia for a related game, "Welltris" (sort of a 3-d version of Tetris) that was popular among the MS-DOS crowd in the late 80s/early 90s.

PebblesRox• 4 years ago

Welltris was great and I loved the music. I think it had more variety than classic Tetris did.

StanislavPetrov2• 4 years ago

The pictures were awesome too!

bergenty2• 4 years ago

This is great. I randomly stumbled on this scene about 6 years ago and it’s great to see this on the front page.

Xcelerate• 4 years ago

I used to be obsessed with Tetris (both on the console and the 40 line clear version on the computer) and ended up programming a version of it that maps one key on the keyboard to one "slot/rotation" combination for each piece. Amazingly, there are enough keys to cover all of the combinations, so each drop is just one key press. Ended up getting some pretty good 40 line clear times for this weird version of Tetris; it felt like I was typing to play the game. I don't know if anyone has done something like that since then—that was probably a decade ago.

emiliobumachar• 4 years ago

Interesting, but there's one thing I didn't get. Why does each piece need different keys?

function_seven• 4 years ago

I don’t think it’s a separate key for each piece. It’s a separate key for each column and rotation.

moozilla2• 4 years ago

There's a variant of this idea called "KeyTris" or "Finesse", here's one implementation: https://github.com/alex-ong/Finesse

Example of someone getting sub 20 seconds with this method: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TGW4j7LRBJk

barbs• 4 years ago

Awesome! That sounds like something worth sharing, if you were willing?

thot_experiment• 4 years ago

That's super cool, what sort of times were you able to achieve? I think it's "cheating" to even use the 180 degree flip button (but obv everyone is free to define their own rules for a game where you're essentially playing against yourself). I can play with zero finesse OR I can sub 50 seconds, but I definitely can't do both at the same time.

DoubleFree• 4 years ago

Years ago I stumbled onto competitive Tetris because the YouTube algorithm pushed the Jonas vs Joseph match on me. I didn't expect it to be exciting, but it was actually captivating and I've followed CTWC (very) passively ever since. The excitement from the commentators is also very infectious.

beebeepka• 4 years ago

I loved my handheld Tetris console as a little kid. I could start at speed 9 (highest) and play for an hour or until I have to pee or something.

These days I am more impressed with people hitting 60% lightning gun in Quake or executing crazy hard army manuevers in StarCraft.

Still though, Tetris is an early love of mine

Ekaros3• 4 years ago

I'm sad they aren't using the original Electronika 60 version for these competitions.

G3rn0ti• 4 years ago

Emacs has tetris mode including highscore list: M-x tetris.

ilitirit• 4 years ago

Not sure if it's mentioned in the article, but this documentary is worth watching if you haven't seen it. It pre-dates some of the newer techniques people are using.

http://watch.ecstasyoforder.com/

layer8• 4 years ago

Slightly off-topic: Does anyone know what happened to Angularis [0] at https://angularis.mondaybits.com/, or how to contact the author? The page went down a couple of days ago. I hugely enjoyed that Tetris variant.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30213972

brxck• 4 years ago

It's still up, but it looks like the certificate expired.

formvoltron• 4 years ago

OK when I was in high school.. and we are talking 1991 here, there was a programmer in a class I was taking who wrote a head to head tetris game as his project for the class.

31 years later the world figures out that head to head tetris is pretty cool.

silpheed5• 4 years ago

Or he had a gameboy from 1989 with a link cable and had already played head to head tetris there?

hinkley• 4 years ago

I need to send this to my brother.

He was the one in our household and social circle to figure out that the counter on the PC version of Tetris was only 16 bits. You maxed out at 65k, not 1 million.

He hit that not by maxing out the score before level 29, but by just learning to push through level 30. He would sit in that office for hours playing a single game, chair pushed back, elbows on knees, looking like a baseball player waiting to clear the bench.

Teens are rewriting what is possible in the world of competitive Tetris

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