Guiness World Record Tournament (Now with movies!)

Congratulations to the both of you!

 

Thanks guys!

It was really cool! A fantastic atmosphere, dozens of PCs with tons of people playing Tetris on them. The crowd was really into it, and I had a great time. Here's how the mysterious tournament actually worked:

Round 1: Tetris Elements, on a random PC station (20 Minute score attack)
Who would have guessed they'd pick this game? I was waaaaay off with my classic PC Tetris prediction. Though despite preparing for entirely wrong Tetris games, I felt relieved when I saw the 7-bag randomizer and knew I could probably improvise my way into the top 8. For this round, you got to play a single game of Marathon until either you died or 20 minutes elapsed (a judge would stop the game manually). So when muf says I should have gotten 10x the second place guy's score, it wasn't a simple matter of surviving indefinetely. All the top contestants could survive 20 minutes no problem. To beat them you needed to get tetrises, and get them quickly. What made this mode especially challenging were the controls:

Left: Left
Right: Right
Soft Drop: Down
Rotate: Up
Other Rotate: Ctrl
Hard Drop: Spacebar
Hold: Enter

Just try and position your hands to use all that comfortably! With so little time to get used to it, DeHackEd and I ignored the Ctrl rotate button completely (well I used it exactly 3 times, extremely carefully, to make t-spins), and we took our hand off the arrow keys to hit Hold (Enter). Far from optimal, but it was a good tradeoff that let us play with relatively few misdrops and most of our speed. The 8 top scorers moved on to the next round.

Round 2: TV Legends Tetris, on a projection screen (Best 2 out of 3 versus)

This game! Argh!

We'd never played it before either, of course, though I do remember once cringing at a description of it's controls. This, my friends, is misdrop heaven. You have to physically rotate the red squares maybe 10 degrees to rotate the piece, and you have to tilt the same squares to move left, right, and soft drop. If you tilt Down, and you are not applying pressure on the exact centre of the edge of the square, it's extremely easy to accidentally swivel at the same time causing a deadly piece-locking/rotating combo that caused the death of several players. Far less annoying, but also strange, were that the pieces were shown in a different orientation in the preview box than they were when they spawned.

These impractical controls slowed down the gameplay a LOT. Though everyone was playing much slower, so it was still a fair competition. I've got to say that the slower gameplay made this a really great show for the audience. They could definitely follow the action, and as a result were very responsive to clever placements and skillful recoveries. Unfortunately, I was matched against DeHacked in the semifinals and bumped him out of the tournament. But for me at least this was the highlight of the event... I feel my matches with him were the most exciting of the tournament, and the crowd was really into it. I'm very much looking forward to rewatching it when it gets put on youtube.

Another thing I liked about this game was that players got identical piece sequences (pure random randomizer) and identical garbage (frequent repeats). Luckily I did not play until 3 matches in, and was able to notice this before I played. Knowing this, I decided to play defensively until either I received garbage or sent a quick double to my opponent. Either way, this would let me know where I should position my tetris hole, giving me a strong strategic advantage against people who stack for a tetris right away. It worked pretty well, as I scored 4 straight wins on my way to the finals (which would use yet another version of Tetris).

Round 3: Gameboy Tetris, on GB Pockets (Best 4 out of 7 versus)

Yes this game! Such a classic, yet such a game I was hoping wouldn't be chosen. I know tons of people are great at this game, but I'm only passable. I find it difficult to move the pieces quickly with the gimped DAS, and I don't know if I'll ever be very good at d-pad mashing. Why I really didn't want this to come up though, was because I don't think it's tournament quality. I feel that even though skill is needed, a lot of it boils down to luck. Do you get the right pieces? Is the garbage in your favour? The player's just not in control. I had heard that Matt (the second place guy) practiced GB Tetris for 2 hours a day for the last 2 weeks in preparation for the tournament, compared to me having played maybe 2 hours total, the day before. So I was expecting the worse, and resigned to the randomness, knowing that even if I played faster or smarter it might not be enough.

I actually lost the first game and was a little confused. I thought the VS was just standard "top out your opponent" VS, but you can also win by clearing 30(?) lines. I lost the first match by this rule, and after learning it forced myself to play faster. I know it sounds stupid right? Why wasn't I simply playing faster before if I could? Somehow I found more speed, and at the same time played cautiously like a man who is truly afraid of the randomizer. I guess it worked out, because I won 4 of the next 5 games to win the tournament.

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So that's how it went down for me. I had a really great day, and not just because of the $1000 prize (that hasn't sunk in yet). The venue was excellent, the people were great, everyone was having fun, and the organizer Syd is one top dude. I've never seen someone so passionate about the history of computer gaming hardware/software, and his humble PC museum is actually really really awesome. And apparently this might happen again! I look forward to it, and might even have to stop by the museum before then to gets some play on the classic PCs.

As a side note I find it ironic that BPS provided the prize money, and yet none of the games were Guideline compliant. And I must say, this experience has really changed my take on speed Tetris. If the upcoming Tetris Cup is to be successful and capture an audience, it's got to be intelligible to average Tetris players somehow. When I was playing Tetris Elements at top speed it was merely an impressive blur. By contrast when the TV Legends Tetris was played, the audience was actually invested in the gameplay and it was more satisfying all around. So all you speed freaks wanting crazy fast no-line-clear-animation VS better give that some thought.

Tons of pictures will follow from me tomorrow. And everything was caught on video so keep checking tetristournament.ca for updates.

And no, I haven't decided what I'll spend the money on yet!

 

Comgrats, congrats, CONGRATS!!!! That sounded like as awesome time. I keep telling my wife we need to move to Canada. Nothing like that ever happens here!!

That sucks that you two went up against each other in the semi-finals. That would have been awesome if it was you two in the finals. At least he was beat by you and not some random.

I probably would not have thought to study it the way you did. Great strategy!

Can't wait to see some pics!! Have fun with your $$$.

Oh, and don't forget to make a vid for yourself and parade it around on youtube.

 

Damn, I wish I could have been there for the third one....

I probably would have been beaten on the first two though.

 

Nice going CT. I would not have been able to adapt so quickly to the weird control methods and obscure tetris games, in fact I'm pretty sure it would've pissed me off a great deal.

But you hung in there and got a well-deserved win.

 

Easy, invest in your retirement.

Great post and congratulations on winning. If Guinness approves this record, that will mean CT is the winner of the largest Tetris tournament to date.

I have, and I still don't like it. Fast is fun and more competitive.

Looking forward to the videos.

 

Hey color thief, I forgot to ask you: Did you have the assistance of the Power Glove to help guide you to your win?

 

Would you believe that I managed to do it without a powerglove?? </TFGM reference>

Anyhow guys here's the pictures we took...

The Tetris Wall. It changes colours.





There were many stations that constantly updated with the current top scores.




Tetris Elements Stations from round 1:




PlayTV Legends Tetris versus from round 2:




GB Tetris versus from the finals (we moved outside to a tent):



The loot I scored:



Countless versions of Tetris being played in the museum (can you name them all?):













Various other stuff around the museum:





That's all I've got! For the most exciting stuff (the videos) you'll have to keep an eye on http://www.tetristournament.ca. They've got a huge amount of footage to go through though, so I wouldn't expect much for a week or two.

 

I don't believe you!!

The tables kick ass!! I would love to do an entire bathroom in the Tetris theme. It would freak some people out...

A flask? A FLASK?! Did you really get a flask with your prizes? That's freaking hilairious! And let me tell ya, you got 3 of the best games for the 360 right there. You could probrably sell them on ebay for about a buck.

Again congrats dude! If they do this again and there is enough notice you should try to schedule one of your get togethers around it. That would be awesome if a whole group of TC people went!

 

congrats on winning the tournament ct, and thanks for all the pics.

that's an impressive collection of tetris games they have. i couldn't possibly name all of them. this one in particular confused me a lot:

it looks like the lines aren't clearing, and there's some kind of green blob suspended above the stack.

and this one looks really primitive. i'd love to play an ancient version like that.

 

It's played on a Commodore SX-64 which is cool. It's a portable C-64.

Can't tell what game it is though.

 

Yeah I'm really curious about that now. Maybe there was a background change and the game was too buggy to handle it properly? Green seems to cover most of the empty space in the stack, except where pieces have been moving.

 

congrats !

 

http://www.tetris-tiles.com/

 

So is anyone here crazy enough to tile a room with ARS colours? CT, perhaps?

 

Hey, here's a shot posted on mtbs3d.com from the Gameboy Tetris round:

http://mtbs3d.com/gallery/albums/userpi ... G_4268.JPG

Looks like a lot of fun! I'd love to meet up with more people and play Tetris competitively like this. Anyone else live in the Seattle area?

By the way, CT, did you see any of the Stereo 3d stuff that was set up? Strangely enough, I also follow the Stereo 3d community and post on mtbs3d.com sometimes, so this is very odd that two of the niche forums that I frequent happened to have something in common.

 

The version of tetris on the sx-64 is the c64 spectrum holobyte tetris.

it is one of the worst versions evar. no twists at ALL!

However, it has AMAZING music. REALLY amazing non-guideline music.

 

I tried it out. The screen must be crazy polarized. You have to wear glasses to get the effect. I played a bit of Unreal on it. It's definitely cool, but I'm not sure how much it's worth paying for.

I also tried the full headset. That didn't work for me at all, but I also didn't do any adjustment either. I think it would have been better had I taken the effort. I'll say this though: while wearing the headset, I found myself actually trying to tilt my head to look around. They're going to need to put motion sensors into that thing.


Lastly, the virtual boy sucked. The tetris game was just a 2d game against a warp-speed-through-space screen saver. The sound was terrible, the randomizer was unpolite, and I developed a minor but noticeable headache in a matter of seconds. No wonder it flopped. Yes, they had a virtual boy.