Tetris Journey

From my previous blogs, it may not be a surprise to some that I really like Tetris. I’ve talked about Tetris in general, my personal favourite favourite game-modes, and even the latest Tetris games. This time however, I would like to talk about my journey with the game.

The first time I remember touching Tetris was in grade 6. It was a math period, we were doing geometry or something, and our teacher let us play Tetris for a bit. It was really weird and the details are a bit fuzzy. What I do remember was that everyone was playing on a N-Block website. For those who don’t remember or haven’t read my previous blogs on the Tetris game-modes, I dislike N-Block. After a few minutes of trying to play and ultimately never surpassing a 1,000 points, the class kind of fooled around. Honestly, this experience kind put a bad taste in my mouth. If I knew I had just subjected myself to the hardest game-mode, I might have picked up Tetris again much earlier. Unfortunately, I didn’t and it wouldn’t be until grade 8 did I pick the game up again.

After a year or so of avoiding Tetris, our story resumes during the final months of grade 8. It was free time (or lunch period I can’t remember), and one of my friends was playing Tetris. The thing that caught my eye was the hold feature. I had never seen it and it was a feature absent from my first encounter with the game. After finding out the website, which was called Tetris Friends, I started playing again. Remember that website, it’s important later. Anyhow, I found my experience with Tetris Friends was much better. I stuck to the modern game-modes like marathon and 2P, while avoiding older ones like N-Block and Tetris 1989 (for now). It was also around this time, some of my other friends started using the website. However, this Isn’t important until a bit later. 

Jump forward to grade 9 and most of my friends have at least played the game. Out of all my friends, only 3 of us really played. Out of the 3 of us, we had a little completion to see who could accumulate the most points. The others played a game occasionally but not often. For the most part, we spent most of grade 9 trying to top each other’s scores and earn the highest rank on 2P. We also met some other in the school who played the game and this when I discovered Tetris.com. I knew of the websites existence, but never had much reason to switch. Most of my friends used Tetris Friends and the websites had multiple game-modes unlike Tetris.com. 

Over the course of the year, my friends and I have been moving through the game-modes. We played through marathon, 2P, sprint, Tetris 1989, basically all the game-modes. The most relevant point was that one of my friends and I were competing for the lowest time on sprint. At this point in time, I had reached my limit with Tetris Friends and most of my friends had dropped the game. Only one friend still played and he was slowly losing interest. From that point on, I had to make a decision. Stick with Tetris Friends, or migrate to Tetris.com. Ultimately, decided to move on from website that brought me into Tetris.

My first real taste of the Tetris.com would be during forth period tech class. This was around the time my friend and I were competing in sprint. Since I reached my limit on Tetris friends, I asked my neighbors what website they were using. After finding out Tetris.com was the most used website in school, I tried a game. I believe during my first go, I got around 60,000 point which wasn’t that high. This was primarily due to how the controls differed between the websites. Although I did say this was first taste, it didn’t mean this was the point in time I permanently made the switch. Honestly the control switch was so jarring, I just stuck to playing marathon on Tetris Friends. Eventually, I realized I could have changed the controls. It was also around this time most of the people on Tetris Friends moved to Tetris.com as well because it was the most popular. From that point on, almost everyone I know used Tetris.com for the most part. 

Once I was on Tetris.com, things didn’t change as much as I thought they would. Aside from 2P and marathon, I didn’t play the other game modes. Nothing major happens until four months ago. Over time I had been honing my marathon skills and managed to reach level 25. In Tetris.com you can skip levels and 25 is the highest level you can skip to. At that point in time, I didn’t know if you could progress any further. After another two months of play, I managed to answer that question. Tetris.com does in fact go beyond level 25 but I also encountered another problem. The pieces barely give you time to rotate. It Isn’t as bad as classic Tetris or N-Block, but still bad. That is when I accepted the fact, I had reached the peak of what I could currently achieve without changing my playstyle drastically. Instead of aiming for high-scores, I would integrate new techniques into my play style. Prior to this, I had always only used the right rotation exclusively. To eliminate the number of rotations I had to turn the pieces, I started experimenting with left rotation. I also tried using z and s spins but found I could use them reliably at higher levels. However, I believed it paid off because of as of last week, I beat my previous high score. I managed to beat my old 780,000 score and breach the 800,000 milestone. 

And that’s it! From my first interaction with Tetris to surpassing 800,000 points. Overall, my Tetris journey has been quite long, longer than most games I play. I guess the next step from this point is to aim for the 900,000s. I believe it will be a while until I have anything to add to this, but when I do, I hope I reach my ultimate goal of a score over 1,000,000.