Tetris and Me

I am no gamer. At all. Grew out of it. I am at the age where I play only Lumosity games and only occasionally when I remember that I still have an active subscription and it's being wasted. I get bored with it too quickly. Besides, there are so many more other interesting and useful things to do.

However, when I was younger, I was a pretty big Tetris player. To the extent that looking back at it now I think I displayed some of the signs of an addict. You be the judge. But first, let me give you some context.

I grew up in the Soviet Union, the home of Tetris. I remember the first time I saw it was in 1987, in the graduating high school class when as a part of a basic programming course we were taken to the city's main computer lab. Tetris had been in existence for three years by then and was hugely popular among the Soviet computer scientists and programmers.

The lab was fascinating for me not only because for the first time I could see where the programming magic was happening and were allowed to play with some of the programming commands on the first Soviet computers Electronika 60, but also because there was a guy there who instead of doing his work was playing Tetris the whole two hours my class was there.

Perhaps playing Tetris was his main job task (I doubt it, but he obviously was playing without the fear of being caught or called out), but he did not acknowledge our presence or tore his eyes off the computer screen even once. I was completely enthralled in watching him play, trying to beat that black-and-white snake that the blocks were building. It was endlessly fascinating. Until, of course, I was allowed on one of the 20 computers in the lab to play with the commands we learned in theory before.

Computers were an impossible luxury in the Soviet Union. My next exposure to them was when a couple of years later, as a university student I met a guy who assembled his own computer from the parts of broken computers written off by the state institutions his father had access to. When I asked him why he got into that hobby (he later started building computers for other people as well), he simply said, "So that I could play Tetris any time I wanted." I quickly befriended the guy and he even let me play Tetris occasionally ('girls and games,' he'd smirk condescendingly).

So I developed an early affinity to Tetris. In 1995, when I was able to afford my first ever laptop (Acer, I still remember), I asked that friend to install Tetris on it, which he happily did. I spent hours in the day with that game in the summer of 1995, before I went to my Master's program in the US. To the point where my mother and my friends became concerned that I was neglecting a lot of other things and people. Had I not started the graduate program I probably would have become an incorrigible irredeemable addict and who knows how my life would have turned out.

And before I went to the US, I deleted Tetris and installed Mario Teaches Typing. Best decision of my life as it taught me touch typing and now I can do it in both English and Russian.

After I came back from the US in June 1997, I started working for a non-profit part-time and freelanced a lot. That flexibility gave me lot of free time and I almost immediately fell back into Tetris. There were much better games at the time already (computer guys at my non-profit played Civilization II after work for hours on end and sometimes I got into their rabbit hole, just watching and giving "strategic advice") but I still played a lot of Tetris.

I lived alone and on the days where I had no other obligations I would play so much that I'd forget to eat or get confused about the time. My mother and friends started to get concerned again, and they didn't even know that I splurged on my first ever Brick Game - a portable console that allowed me to take Tetris anywhere with me. Until again I was saved from the game by the fact that I started to teach full-time at the American university.

When I played, I got so good that I seriously thought and hoped to get to the point where Tetris would crash. Beat the game. The highest level I achieved was 28, one away from what was deemed achievable at the time.

No one could beat Tetris at the time, but rumors and insider information from the programmers suggested that at some point at Level 29 the game would crash because the creators never thought anyone would ever be able to achieve that level. Now, of course, it looks laughable as Tetris gamers are approaching Level 200.

I am glad I stopped playing Tetris when I did and avoided the temptation to download it on my first ever cellphone - Nokia 3210 when it became a new infatuation giving the game another wind.

But I would still occasionally tap into the Tetris world to see if anyone ever beat the game. I was fascinated by how far it advanced, with the new techniques of tapping and rolling that increased the player's speed almost exponentially. I was also pleased to see that so many young players are still playing the game, a lot of them online competing and collaborating, and in huge live conferences. The levels they achieve are unfathomable for me - 100, 127, 140, etc.

And then finally someone did beat the game, on January 4, 2024 (I know, this story is almost two years too late). And it was a 13-year-old boy from Oklahoma, Willis Gibson aka Blue Scuti, who reached level 157, where Tetris crashed. Here' the news report highlighting his achievement driven by a family tragedy and persistence that was ultimately rewarded:

I'm happy for you, kid, but I still wish it were me who beat the game back in the day.