Ms. Cox bought her son a version of a Nintendo console called RetroN, which used the same hardware as the original Nintendo console, from a pawn shop, along with an old CRT television for the help get started. In a given week, Willis said, he plays about 20 hours of Tetris.
“I actually agree with that,” said Ms. Cox, a high school math teacher. “He’s doing other things besides playing Tetris, so it wasn’t really hard to say OK. It was harder to find an old CRT TV than to say, “Yeah, we can do this for a little while.” »
For decades, players have “beat” Tetris by hacking the game’s software. But Willis, who last year became one of the best Tetris players in the country, is considered the first to do it on hardware original.
“This has never been done by a human before,” said Vince Clemente, chairman of the Classic Tetris World Championship, adding: “This is basically something that everyone thought was impossible until a few years ago .”
In the competitive world of Tetris, the goal is generally to outplay your opponents rather than outlast them. “Try crashing” is a totally different approach. It is an act of survival.
“The main strategy is just to play as safe as possible,” Willis said.
It’s a little more complicated than that, said David Macdonald, a video game expert content creator and competitive Tetris player known as aGameScout. In recent years, top players have started using the “roll technique”, a method of rapid typing using multiple fingers instead of just one or two. This innovation changed what is possible in competitive Tetris. More and more high-level players are “going crashing”, instead of simply accumulating as many points as possible before being defeated by the game.
