posted: 2025-09-18
On Tetris
I am not allowed to say that I am “good at Tetris”, even if it happens to be a game I have played a lot. I have never executed a T-Spin Triple, which is the qualifier that separates the “capable” players from the “good” players. The “really good” players treat the game like a fighting game. I don’t play fighting games. I am not coordinated enough to focus on what my opponent is doing. Rather, I play Tetris- a game where, in theory, all I have to do is clear lines and chain together combos faster than my opponent can clear their own blocks. To some, this could be considered “a fighting game”- sure, but I’ve never really seen it as one. I find the single player campaigns of fighting games to be much more my speed, and naturally this extends to Tetris. If you asked me to hold my own in a competitive game of Tetris, I would build a two-wide well down the middle of the chute and pray. I am proficient at Tetris as a concept, so long as I can store pieces and have projections where they fall. You give me this modern form of Tetris, and I will be able to hold my own. But this doesn’t make me “good” at Tetris.
I don’t champion myself as a Tetris player in any capacity. I am not an NES Tetris player whatsoever, and you can bet your I-mino that I will never make it to the Kill Screen in my lifetime. There are worldwide competitions for NES Tetris. It is, to some, the only true way to play the game. When I was barely a teenager, I once told someone that I “played a lot of Tetris”. They asked if they could see me play some, as they had played a bunch themselves. I said "sure". But once I started, they became irate quicker than the time it took for me to fast drop my first block. “You can’t call yourself a good Tetris player if you can see the shadow where the piece is going to land. Back when I was playing it, I had to be able to predict where it would land”. This Gen-Xer’s comments annoyed me, but what was I supposed to do? I was a strait-laced early-Zoomer who didn’t understand the notion of sticking it to the old man. I didn’t have an NES either. I just went back to Tetris Friends on Facebook and kept playing.
Tetris Friends was one of the first games that I bothered to get good enough at to “be competitive”. It started as a way to flirt with a cute girl I liked in middle school. Through the process of “talking to a girl I liked”, I found out that she, a girl, liked playing games like Tetris on Facebook. I liked her enough to ask her what the name of the game was. I then went home and logged into Facebook on the family iMac. I started playing Marathon mode with our wireless keyboard, and clacked away dropping blocks, getting a sense of the falling tetrominos. I then saw she was online.
“Tetris Friends is fun”, I messaged her.
“u want to play me?”
“You can play other people in Tetris?”
“yeah! i’ll chall u”
What followed was a two-player battle, which culminated in my defeat.
“its ok, u just started playing :)”
I still liked her, even after she beat me. But I also told myself that I needed to get better. I couldn’t fathom the notion of accepting that she was just going to be better than me. I didn’t have to be better than her, but I had to be better than the person that had lost to her. I had to get better to show her how cool I was.
I kept playing solo after that initial defeat, my perfect record nonexistent. They say that if you want to get good at a new game you need to learn how to lose fast and learn faster. I played Tetris Friends every day when I came home after school. Once finished, I marked the practice time on my Orchestra practice sheets to keep track of how long I had played. If I found a pocket of time to actually practice my violin, no one would suspect that I was using that time to grind on Tetris Friends instead. Maybe they would have noticed when a 13-year-old kid who claimed to practice his violin five hours a week still couldn’t shift from first to third position but had managed to climb up to Gold Rank had they been paying attention. But they weren’t, and I skirted along by.
I skirted along by so frequently, in fact, that I started to reach stages in Tetris Friends where I would lose again. I couldn’t fathom why players would opt to make a well four blocks wide down the middle of the chute rather than try to continuously make Tetrises using I-blocks. I wasn’t able to comprehend how they would rack up so many lines of trash that they’d win instantly. Soon, the pressure of losing was a greater force than the joy of getting good at the game.
The girl I liked didn’t really seem to like me that much. We had our rematches, and I regularly handed her defeat. I wonder if she didn’t like me as much after that. Maybe she just wanted someone to play with her. Maybe she didn’t want to play in the same capacity I did. Maybe she didn’t see everything in life as a competition.
When I couldn’t play on the iMac, I played on my DSi XL with the DSi Ware launch of Tetris Party Live. It was a simple little Tetris game I bought with some Christmas money. I wanted a Tetris game on my portable console, and Tetris Party Live offered that, and more. Of its multiple modes, one was the same kind of multiplayer “fighting game” approach that Tetris Friends had, though over the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. In 2010, this was a revolutionary factor; the concept of playing Tetris with three other people across the world on a handheld Nintendo console was magic. The world had only recently figured out smartphones, the fact that the Nintendo DSi had an on-platform digital storefront was already quite impressive. The idea that I could play this “battle” style of Tetris while I was in bed was enough to make me a true fiend.
I soon realized that playing competitive modes in bed, half-awake was not the way to win. But I still wanted to play Tetris, which meant I cut my teeth playing the single-player mode.
I played when I had time. I was thirteen. I had plenty of time.
I played Tetris Party Live on my 25th Anniversary of Super Mario Bros. Nintendo DSi XL at any acceptable spare moment. I was clearing stage 15 in the back of my mother’s car as we drove to the cabin for Easter weekend, doing my best to stave off any car sickness. I had to pass the time on the drive somehow. Locking in on Tetris was far more manageable than attempting to clear the secret final level of Cave Story while also managing both the ever-dropping battery of my console and queasiness that creeped into my gut. But for as much as I enjoyed my games to my own detriment, I never brought them into my school environment.
In my "research" for this piece, on my fiorst boot of the game, Imanaged to beat my 10 year High Score. I've still got it.
In my Junior year of High School, everyone got a School District-issued Chromebook. These low-cost machines were introduced into classrooms in 2014 with the intention of advancing students into the digital age. They were to now learn by reading from .pdf files instead of printed handouts. But intention and actual application hardly align when dealing with teenagers. While I kept diligent care of my Chromebook compared to others in my cohort, I spent my school days looking for ways to bypass the school firewalls instead of reading the aforementioned .pdf files. During this time, I worked as a gymnasium attendant, overseeing the community gyms that were attached to my High School. They gave me a set of keys to the entire building, and the access code to disable the alarms in a subsection of the school. For up to twelve hours a week, I would go back to my high school after hours, unlock the building, set up the gym for the group that was renting it for the night, and then sit in the closet I had converted into an office-type space. I was paid the whole time I sat in the closet, so I used my Chromebook to finish the homework assignments and then pass the time on 2015 YouTube 1. About halfway through the school year they blocked 2015 YouTube, so I pivoted into playing games of Tetris on the unblocked https://play.tetris.com/ 2. And so now, my bosses were paying me to play Tetris. Life in Junior year was never the same.
Like with Tetris Party Live, any time I wasn’t occupied with something more important, I was playing Tetris. I would get to school at 6:45 AM, drop my stuff off at my locker, get a library pass at 7:00 AM, and then make my way to the classroom where I would eventually have first period to play a round of Tetris before the first bell at 7:20 AM. Students would trickle into the classroom around me as I would be breaking into the higher levels. I always imagined that they would be catching glances of my gameplay as they came in, thinking it was impressive that I could chain back-to-back Tetrises in fractions of seconds. They would think I was so cool when I was able to play Tetris when the blocks started disappearing from their untrained sight, a factor that I had to contend with upon clearing level 25. I would top out shortly thereafter, and then class would start. My morning routine was consistent and anti-social. I wished for recognition I would never receive.
Here's some proof that, at one point in my life, I managed to play Tetris with semi-invisible blocks
Pardon the music, I was in a bad electro swing phase
I got my first “victory royale” in Tetris 99 on the same day it released. It wasn’t all that hard to do. All I had to do was channel all the skills I had developed over the prior decade of focus and concentration, and map my movements on to the buttons of my Nintendo Switch’s joycons. The “battle royale” style gameplay enticed me. I, having worn the badge of “never played Fortnite” for a year all the while longing for a childhood where I was good at Minecraft Hunger Games, saw my opportunity to finally make use of my invisible skill. I could win something. I would win something.
It was the day before Valentine’s Day, 2019. I was more absorbed into my Junior year of my undergraduate career than any kind of relationship, physical or digital. In that time, games were a luxury. They were things I made time for. Tetris 99 was a game I made time for.
After having watched the Nintendo Direct announcement earlier that day, I made the conscious decision that Wednesday to do my work at home so that I could have a quick moment of respite with the new game. I would play a few rounds of Tetris 99 to see what the whole thing was about and then get back to doing my partial differential equations homework. Four days later I threw my entire body into a snowbank to see if I could make an outline of my own body, just to feel the cold on my skin. A week later I would trip on my way to catch the bus to work, ripping my only pair of nice pants, and scraping my knee in the process. A little over a month later I’d meet a woman with the brightest blue eyes I had ever seen. I would later send her a picture of my accomplishments in Tetris 99.
I cannot win Tetris 99 anymore; I am not good enough to do so. I am capable of playing well, but I cannot score wins as regularly as I once could. I chalk this up to the natural evolution of the average Tetris 99 player, and the culling of those who were interested in Tetris 99 more as a novelty than as a ladder to climb. The last time I tried was in 2022. I don’t feel the need to try again. I’m not surprised by this. I don’t have anything else to prove here, and I have other games to play.
need the "kirby with voice acting" guy to read this line
— john videogames (@voltage.neocities.org) August 23, 2025 at 9:47 AM
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Playing Tetris is baked into my being. As long as I know the controls, I can store the blocks, and I can see where the pieces will land, I will be able to play Tetris with general competence. I am a capable Tetris player. I make no effort to define myself as a “good” Tetris player. I just have happened to play a lot of Tetris over the course of fifteen years of my life. It is my invisible skill. My party trick. My hustle. My answer to “what’s something we wouldn’t know about you just by looking at you?”. Many hours dedicated to a fascination without a goal in mind does not allow me to claim expertise. I am nothing but a hobbyist. I am a former enthusiast who only chose to play Tetris when it served my other goals. I do not choose to regularly play Tetris without a reason besides “playing Tetris”.
Yet still, I play Tetris. I like Tetris. It’s fun.
Footnotes. Yes, Footnotes
I never said I was a bad student, just a lazy one. Maybe that’s why I managed to get away with all those things I did. Maybe that’s why I make for a decent engineer. Maybe that’s why all those tech people keep trying to get me to join their tech start-ups. No idiots, I’m LAZY.↩︎
It tickles me that I can still visit this website and play the same game I played ten years ago with little to no differences.↩︎