Page 17 - Old School Gamer Magazine Issue #38 FREE Edition

TETRIS
A COMPETITIVE SCENE LIKE NO OTHER
Everyone knows the story of Tetris... most everybody. Tetris is a puzzle video game created in
1985 by Alexey Pajitnov, a Soviet software engineer. It has been published by several companies for multiple platforms, most prominently during a dispute over the appropriation of the rights in the late 1980s. After a significant period of publication by Nintendo, the rights reverted to Pajitnov in 1996, who co-founded the Tetris Company with Henk Rogers to manage licensing.
Tetris established itself as one
of the greatest video games
ever made. By December 2011,
it had sold 202 million copies – approximately 70 million physical units and 132 million paid mobile game downloads – making it one of the best-selling video game franchises. The Game Boy version is one of the best-selling games of all time, with more than 35 million copies sold.
Somewhere in the mid-2000s, Esports took video gaming by storm. It became careers for most players and the prize money was increasing significantly each
year. Most of these games were either first person shooter games
or fighting games. but along the way, more games were thrown into the mix, for example, Tetris. Tetris has always been a competitive game against friends or family by beating the high score, but no one really competed professionally in a tournament setting until 2010. This is when the Classic Tetris World Championship was born.
By Todd Friedman
The Classic Tetris World Championship (CTWC) is a video game competition series, hosted by the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. This video game conference in Portland was started by video game collector Rick Weis. I asked Rick what his motivation was for starting this video game expo and he told me that he first got involved with PRGE when it was the Northwest Classic Games Enthusiasts (NWCGE) back in the year 2000. His motivation was that he attended his first retro con in 1998 (World
of Atari) and was blown away by
it. After talking to the organizer
of World of Atari he knew that he wanted to get involved with a show like that one and make others have the same feeling I was experiencing going to these. In 2010, the Tetris competition launched, during
the filming of Ecstasy of Order:
The Tetris Masters to determine
the world's greatest Tetris player. You can read more about Rick in this issue of Old School Gamer Magazine.
One of the experts in this competition is Chris Tang. Chris is an accomplished game
designer, cosplayer, and video game champion. He is best known from the $25,000 "Sega World Championship: Rock the Rock" that was broadcast on MTV.
Chris can be heard as the Tetris World Championship announcer for competitive Tetris world tournaments for many years.
Chris had his first experience playing Tetris with the Atari arcade version. I asked Chris what got him excited about this and he told me, “The simple to learn, challenging to master mechanics really stood out, even though the level-based line clear format of the coin-op was different from most other versions of the game. Like many others I found myself playing the game
in my head after first exposure - which some call the “Tetris Effect”, which is really a testament to the amazing impact the game has on the mind!”
The 1990 Nintendo World Championships was Chris’s first competitive Tetris event. This was not an exclusive Tetris tournament but was one of the games in the Championship. He came in third
Chris Tang
in Oakland, but his mom drove him to Los Angeles the week after and he ended up winning
it there. What he remembers most was how professional and well-presented everything was. Chris told me, “This Powerfest was
more than just a tournament, it was Nintendo creating a
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