♫ - HOME- We're Finally Landing
Tetris. The most popular puzzler in history.
You’d be hard-pressed to find any electronic device, from a flip phone to the Nintendo Switch,
that doesn’t have some implementation of this legendary game.
If you’ve heard of video games, you’ve heard of Tetris.
But how far can you even take such a simple game?
What happens when you push Tetris to its limits?
Many players have chosen to push modern variants of Tetris to the edge,
and with helpful mechanics allowing for faster play,
the best of them are capable of placing 6 pieces on the board in a single second.
Other players have opted to push games like the Tetris: the Grand Master series to the edge,
featuring less permitting mechanics and very difficult requirements for the highest grade possible, Grand Master.
But some players have opted to go back to the roots of Tetris.
Strip away the hold piece, every extra preview,
the ability to slide pieces around before they lock, and the result is NES Tetris.
Released in 1989 for the Nintendo Entertainment System,
people have been playing and pushing the highscores up for 30 years.
This is the story of those players.
This is the world record progression of NES Tetris.
♫ - HOME- Resonance
The concept of Tetris likely doesn’t need much explanation, but here’s a quick rundown.
The player drops pieces, called tetriminos, into a 10x20 board.
If a row is fully filled, the row is cleared and everything above drops down to take its place.
Clearing more rows at once grants higher scoring,
and the most efficient scoring method is the “tetris”, when four rows are cleared at once.
The game gives a random distribution of the 7 tetriminos, also known by letter names:
T, J, Z, O, S, L, and I.
Modern versions of Tetris use the 7-bag randomizer,
which guarantees that a player will get one of each of the seven tetrominos every seven pieces.
NES Tetris does not use the seven bag randomizer, and instead uses a truly random piece generation scheme.
This RNG is notoriously difficult to deal with,
and many a possible world record run has been killed because of a bad sequence of pieces generated by the RNG.
Typically, players will build up a 9-block wide stack of pieces on the left in order to drop the I piece into the right side and score a tetris.
This hole on the right is called the “well”, and can actually be built anywhere on the board if necessary.
Like many other Tetris games, the speed curve of NES Tetris is built around a system of levels.
Reaching a certain number of lines will increase the level, and with each passing level comes a speed bump.
Well, sort of.
You see, since the game can only increase the speed by the number of frames it takes a piece to fall one row,
that limits the number of options the developers had for speed changes.
After level 9, the levels can be separated into groups by their speed.
In levels 10 through 12, pieces fall a row every five frames.
In levels 13 through 15, pieces fall a row every four frames.
In levels 16 through 18, pieces fall a row every three frames,
and in levels 19 through 28, the pieces fall a row every two frames.
From level 29 onwards, the pieces fall a row every frame.
This speed is considered the “killscreen” because it is virtually impossible to get pieces to the left and right using the game’s built in delayed autoshifter.
The delayed autoshifter of NES Tetris is very slow compared to more modern Tetris games,
at 10 shifts per second with a 266 millisecond delay before those shifts
However, a few players have somewhat managed to get around this limitation by manually tapping out every piece shift on the controller,
a technique known as hyper-tapping.
However, even the 15 shifts per second this method usually yields pales in comparison to modern versions of the game,
with an infinite number of shifts per second,
and a delay of whatever a player feels comfortable with before those shifts.
Add on the fact that, compared to modern Tetris games,
the rotation system of NES Tetris is very basic and does not allow for as many spins and moves,
and you will start to see why the game has gained a reputation for being incredibly difficult to master.
Players may select any level from 0-19 to start on,
with each level generally having more scoring potential than the last.
The best players use 18 almost exclusively.
18 has a much lower difficulty than 19, which makes the slight reduction in scoring worth it.
Starting from 18 has the effect that the game has two stages:
130 lines of pre-transition on the easier 18 speed,
(It is 130 lines instead because of a bug in the way the game handles the line count.)
and 100 lines of post-transition on the harder 19 speed.
But no matter what level the player starts on, they will have to score nearly all of their points before level 29.
From this level onward, the game is virtually unplayable, both due to the sheer speed of the level,
and also due to the fact that it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to get pieces to the side.
For this reason, one of the most notable achievements of NES Tetris is getting past Level 29 and reaching Level 30.
To do this, a player has to clear ten lines at the speed of level 29,
a feat thought so far out of the question that the level numbers run out at 29.
The other notable achievement in NES Tetris is the maxout.
If you look at the score counter for NES Tetris, you will notice how it only has six digits.
Since it does not roll over, the maximum possible score is 999999.
When the score reaches this number, the player has maxed out the game.
The story of NES Tetris world records begins in 2009.
Even twenty years after the game’s release, it has managed to keep a small following across America.
Even though it is well past its heyday, a few people,
most of whom have been playing the game ever since it came out, are still secretly playing it.
Some members of this little community are connected with each other through forums,
and some only play by themselves, not knowing others are doing the same.
A site called Twin Galaxies is the way that most of those people keep track of everyone else’s scores.
Going back to our two notable achievements, the maxout and level 30,
several people had claimed them at this point, but none had acceptable proof.
Thor Aackerlund had claimed to max the game out and reach Level 30 in 1990,
but almost no one believed him because no one else had been able to get either of those accomplishments on video since.
Some were questioning if the maxout was even possible.
A player would have to fit so much perfection into the space of just 230 lines before the killscreen, they said.
It was infeasible, they said.
But on April 19, 2009, it happened.
Harry Hong achieved the very first maxout to be verified by Twin Galaxies.
However, Harry wasn't the first.
Jonas Neubauer had two maxouts on video before Harry Hong got his on video,
but neither were of acceptable quality for the official leaderboards.
The first was a level 18 maxout without game audio,
and the second a level 19 maxout recorded on a flip phone.
The latter may very well be the first recorded level 19 maxout in the history of NES Tetris.
However, the low quality and lack of game audio made it seem almost like Bigfoot footage,
so most passed it off as fake at the time.
Not too long after Harry, Thor would also post footage of a maxout,
achieved starting on 19, and ending with a level 30.
It’s unfortunately not possible to prove Thor ever maxed out in 1990,
but his incredible skill in 2009 makes a compelling argument that he did.
♫ - Luminist - Solar Movement
Since the score counter in NES Tetris stops at 999,999,
the world record progression is extraordinarily hard to track across the early years.
Instead of going through the process of hand-calculating scores past maxout,
most players simply tracked the number of lines they took to max out.
That was, until  March 21st, 2015, when Joshua Tolles created the Game Genie code ENEOOGEZ.
This Game Genie code uncaps the score counter of NES Tetris, allowing players to tally their scores past maxout easily.
Harry Hong scored the first recorded 1.1 and 1.15 million scores a month after ENEOOGEZ was introduced,
but it is hard to say if anyone in the past had ever achieved higher scores.
Considering the skill levels of the top players at the time, and how long it had been since the first maxouts,
it is likely that these were not the first 1.1 million scores, or even the highest.
However, the next milestone, 1.2 million, was a much harder one to accomplish.
♫ Jussi-Matti "Elwood" Salmela - Dead Lock
We return back to Harry Hong.
Since his two recorded 1.1 Million scores on his YouTube channel,
Harry has started streaming to Twitch under the username, SuPaSaYaJiN.
In this stream, he is going for 1.2, as evidenced by the pace chart at the top left.
The 1.2 million milestone is incredibly difficult to accomplish at this point
because there is far less margin of error for a player to mess up than if they were to score a 1.1.
It is necessary to score up to 100 thousand more points than a 1.1 score during the same space of 230 lines.
A hundred thousand points is around three or four Tetrises,
which may not sound like a lot, but that means that a player has 12 to 16 less lines to burn.
And burned lines add up fast. Just a single misdrop can easily force a player to burn six to eight lines.
To score a 1.2, a player must play even closer to perfection.
"Pace is real"
Harry smashes his pace goal of 600 to 650 thousand at the 130-line transition with a score of 696 thousand.
Harry maxes out midway through level 25, breaking even the highest score he expected he needed for a 1.2.
"YES!"
*laughing*
With a double on Level 29, Harry Hong achieves the first ever 1.2 million score in NES Tetris, claiming the world record.
After the 1.2 million barrier was broken in NES Tetris, the only thing left at this point was to become the second one to break it.
♫ - Luminist - Inner World
Jonas Neubauer is a player who needs no introduction.
Having possibly achieved the very first maxout, and technically the first one recorded on video,
he is definitely a top tier player.
What’s more is at this point, Jonas has won every Classic Tetris World Championships event,
except in 2014, when he lost to Harry Hong.
Right now, Jonas is playing a casual game - or so he thinks.
Jonas transitions at 666 thousand points.
At this point, in order to break the 1.2 barrier he needs around 533 thousand points after level 19.
Jonas hits 205 lines 17 points shy of a maxout.
He has 4 lines available to burn for 1.2, and takes two of them already.
Jonas gets a 1.2 million score of his own, and he doesn’t even know it at the moment -
as far as he knows, it’s just a casual game.
A maxout midway through level 26, and some play afterwards.
And it’s at this point that it sets in that 1.2 million is perfectly achievable for high level players.
♫ - HOME- Marantz PMD211 Stereo Summing Test
This next score, also by Jonas Neubuaer, is also significant.
It is the last time that a DAS player has ever held the score world record in NES Tetris.
This record was set during a casual stream of his, just like his last world record.
Jonas transitions at 677 thousand.
With a score like this, he will need around 534 thousand points after the level 19 transition to beat his previous world record of approximately 1.21 million points.
Jonas maxes out into level 25, at 190 lines, one of the earliest recorded maxouts in history.
Jonas scores 1.1 million into level 27, and at this point he only needs three Tetrises to break his previous world record.
"Oh, let's go!
"Get out of my face!"
"Oh my gosh, that pace!
*clap clap clap*
This score marks the end of the era of dominance of DAS players, and from here on out, almost every record is held by a hypertapper.
♫ - HOME- Mind
Koji Nishio, or Koryan is a player who may need a small introduction.
His first experiences with Tetris were with the Tetris: the Grand Master series of games,
but he isn’t a new player to the Tetris community,
with his competition premiere being in CTWC 2016, where he made it to the top four, losing against Jonas
He is also one of three known hypertappers in the community at this point,
with the other two being Thor Aackerlund and a mysterious figure on YouTube known as Spectre, or DanZ.
This game was played during one of his practice streams, where he was trying to improve and maybe beat his personal best of 1.202 million points.
Koryan transitions at 674 thousand points, well on pace for a score above 1.2 million.
Koryan maxes out into level 26 at around 199 lines.
Although this is worse than Jonas’s previous score, where he maxed out into Level 25,
the main advantage of hypertapping is that a player can maneuver pieces into places where they otherwise wouldn’t be able to fit,
effectively giving a hypertapper like Koryan more options on where he can place his pieces than someone like Jonas,
allowing him to usually score higher with the same RNG.
"One..."
"Please...!"
"Please, come on!"
"YES!!!"
"WHOOO!"
"Yes!"
"Yes!!"
With a Tetris into level 29, Koryan breaks the 1.25 million barrier,
and takes one of the most contested world records in NES Tetris from Jonas Neubuaer.
This score marks the beginning of the reign of hypertappers.
♫- Foewi - Negative Gravity 
But up until this point, the speed of level 29 has remained a killscreen,
with only three people known to have reached level 30:
Thor Aackerlund, Jani Herlevi, and Koryan.
Of these people, Thor and Koryan are hypertappers.
But up until this point, almost no one had even considered the possibility of getting to a level past 30.
Most people brushed it off as impossible.
In 2018, a new generation of teen players is beginning to form.
Some of them are DAS players, and some of them are hypertappers
Joseph Saelee is one of the latter.
He has already gotten 43 maxouts and 20 level 30s, as can be seen by his counters in the bottom right.
Most of these teens have gotten into NES Tetris after seeing CTWC content and the Boom: Tetris For Jeff meme video on YouTube
In this stream, Joseph is going for the lines world record and level 31.
To get to level 31, the player needs to clear twenty lines within the killscreen,
a feat that was considered impossible by many.
However, with hypertapping, it is possible to get pieces all the way to the left of the screen,
but this is only possible with a low stack, which is why Joseph is trying to keep the stack low into 29.
♫- Anvil - Path to Nowhere
"Woah, yes! Woah!"
"Oh my god!"
"Yes!"
"Yes!!"
"Yes!!!"
Joseph reaches 311 lines, the first level 31 in recorded history, and the lines world record in NES Tetris.
This milestone is much more than it appears to be at the surface.
It proved that it was feasible for a human to play and score points within level 29,
and it was one of the first steps on the path to hypertapper dominance.
Since this point, Joseph has always held the lines world record.
He reached level 32 less than a month afterwards,
level 33 four months after 32,
level 34 exactly a year after 33,
and level 35 four months after 34.
From this point onward, we will be focusing solely on score world records.
♫- Three Chain Links - All We Ever See of Stars
Around nine months after his previous score world record,
Koryan is once again streaming a Tetris practice session.
Here, he is attempting to beat his previous record, as can be seen by his goal text in the bottom left.
He’s been streaming for around an hour and a half at the start of this game.
Koryan transitions at 641 thousand points.
At this point, beating his record is doable,
but it will be very difficult, as it will require over 600 thousand points to be scored within level 19.
Koryan maxes out at 200 lines.
At this point, he needs another 257 thousand points to beat his previous world record.
While it is doable, it is difficult.
"YES!"
"Yes, I updated my world..."
"beat world record! Yes!"
After nine months, Koryan had finally done it: he had updated his score world record on NES Tetris,
and it seemed this was where it would stay for a long time.
However, only three months later, and seemingly out of nowhere...
♫- Stevia Sphere - Polar Bears
1975TylerP is a mysterious figure in the Tetris community.
He is a new player who just sprung up into the scene very recently, without much backstory,
but he’s already a high level player who has scored 1.2 million.
He’s already gotten a 1.1 million in this stream alone, and is going for three maxouts and a level 30 in this stream.
Tyler transitions at 679 thousand points, narrowly missing out on a 700 thousand transition.
Tyler maxes out in level 24, the second earliest recorded maxout in history.
This game has potential for far more than just a 1.2 at this point.
Tyler scores 1.1 midway through level 26,
leaving him lots of headroom to not only break the world record,
but also get something much greater than the world record.
Tyler finishes the game with 1.298 million points, less than two thousand away from 1.3 million.
1.3 was well within his grasp, but he missed the double with the T piece going into level 29, killing his chance.
Tyler’s game sent shockwaves throughout the Tetris community.
From it, everyone knew that 1.3 was very possible, and not only was it possible, but it could happen at any time.
This began a race to become the first to get a score of 1.3 million.
♫- Jogeir Liljedahl - Nearly There
This game by Harry Hong was played during one of his streams, starting on level 18.
Harry transitions at 665 thousand points.
At this point, in order to score 1.3, he needs to score 635 thousand post transition points.
Harry maxes out within level 25, needing 300 thousand points in 30 lines in order to get 1.3.
"Aah!"
Harry finishes the game one Tetris short of a 1.3 million score,
since he burned two lines at the beginning of level 26, when he only had one line to burn for the 1.3.
After another near miss, people started to wonder even more, when would it happen?
♫- PixelVideos - Saltwave Contemplative
We return back to Koryan.
In this stream, Koryan is going for 1.3, as can be seen by his goal text in the bottom left.
Koryan transitions at 600 thousand points.
At this point, to get a score of 1.3 million, he will need to score 700 thousand points in the post-transition phase of the game,
a feat that has never been accomplished before.
Koryan maxes out midway through level 25. 1.3 is possible, but he has almost no lines to burn.
With a series of unfortunate events and bad pieces, Koryan is denied the opportunity to score 1.3., topping out at 1.26 million points.
♫- Skaven - The Alchemist
An emulator player by the name of PMYA has existed in the shadows for quite some time in the Tetris community,
overshadowed by other more well known console players, however, he is still a very skilled player.
This game was played during a test stream for an NES Tetris versus platform called NEStris 99.
PMYA transitions at 657 thousand points.
PMYA maxes out into level 25. He only needs another 300,000 points for a 1.3.
PMYA goes into level 28 with 1.23 million, only needing two Tetrises and change for a 1.3.
Unfortunately, he has to build a hole and burn a double, denying him the opportunity for the last Tetris.
PMYA later posted a screenshot of an unrecorded 1.29 million score in various discords later on.
For a long time, no one was sure who would get the first 1.3 million in NES Tetris.
Some were rooting for one of the DAS players, Harry or Jonas
Some were rooting for Koryan.
Some were wondering whether Tyler would be the one to get it.
But in the end...
♫- Seth "Beatfox" Peelle - Celestial Fantasia
"Yes!"
"Oh my god!!"
"Oh my ga-haha! Oh, Jesus Christ! Oh, my god! Oh, my god!"
"Oh, I'm so- I'm shaking so hard right now!"
"Oh, my goodness!"
Joseph Saelee scores the first ever 1.3 million and even gets a Tetris in level 29,
setting a new world record, and, getting over 1.35 million points, making people wonder about the possibility of 1.4 million.
PMYA was the next player to get a 1.3 million, however he usually does not record his games and this one was no exception, so it is screenshot only.
Jakegames2 was the next to get 1.3 million, coming less than 1000 points away from Joseph’s incredible score.
The only recording that exists of this game besides the screenshots is audio from a voice call, however.
This is a special day for two reasons.
One, Joseph broke the score world record.
And two, Joseph broke it again, in under an hour.
Joseph’s first game was on a 19 start,
with 632 thousand points at 130 lines,
a maxout in level 25,
a 1.1 into level 27,
a 1.2 into level 28,
and a 1.3 into killscreen along with an extra 67 thousand points.
And Joseph’s second game had the potential to be a lot more than it was.
Joseph had 716 thousand points at 130 lines.
Joseph maxes out midway through level 24.
"No..."
"That's not- that's not good!"
"Oh my god! World record though!"
"Dude!"
With a sequence of unfavorable pieces, however, Joseph is denied the opportunity for a 1.4 million score.
♫- Jogeir Liljedahl - Signia
The only question then, is when will 1.4 million happen?
Well, Joseph may have already gotten it.
A screenshot was posted in the CTM discord of a game by Joseph on June 14, which shows 1,439,173.
This game was not recorded in any way, however there are several witnesses who saw Joseph do it in a voice call.
So did Joseph actually get 1.4? The majority of the community trusts him on it.
However, there’s another way to score even higher that went mostly unexplored for over thirty years....
Until now.
♫- Jogeir Liljedahl - Physical Presence
RNG manipulation in NES Tetris has been something TAS-only for a very long time.
However, a player by the name of Scottobozo has been routing a human viable 1.5 million score.
The process for this is finding a starting point that is possible for a human to hit consistently, and memorizing the optimal placements to make.
Since NES Tetris has a predictable randomizer, doing the same sequence of inputs on the menu will always give a player the same position within the seed,
and therefore the same pieces, assuming they make all of the same placements.
In this run, he is attempting to human verify the TAS he memorized.
Scott transitions at 753 thousand points, along with his TAS, nearly a perfect transition.
Scott maxes out into level 23, the earliest possible time to max out from a level 18 start.
Scott scores 1.4 and 1.5 within level 28, beating out every other game of NES Tetris.
The community’s almost universal response to this run was to make it a separate category from runs where the player doesn’t know what they will get, also known as random seed runs.
And it makes sense too, because if the most effective tactic was memorizing a seed and attempting to start at the correct position,
it would take away the aspects of NES Tetris that make it an enjoyable game to play, even thirty years later.
RNG manipulation definitely has a spot,
but the community agrees that it is in the best interests of the game to separate runs with manipulated RNG from random seed runs.
So what does the future of NES Tetris world records hold?
Well, the world records that we have today will almost certainly not stand the test of time.
Joseph’s 1.4, which is the current world record, will almost certainly be beaten.
Scott’s set seed score of 1.5 million will also almost certainly be beaten, as there was no killscreen play involved.
And the meta may change from scoring everything before the killscreen to scoring a significant chunk of points within the killscreen,
now that it’s effectively no longer a killscreen for hypertappers.
The metagame, both in fundamental technique and mental technique, and world records of NES Tetris have evolved very very much over the last eleven years.
And they haven’t even come close to the limits yet.
But for now, these are our world records.
Thanks for watching.
