There are more blocks in jeopardy of causing a collision if the piece were to enter flat side down. Given entry below the playfield frame and how the rotation rules work, flat side down probably would have also meant that the piece spawning one y-coordinate lower. With point side down, you start with less blocks on the bottom and can "polevault" over things by rotating to flat side down because of the central rotation point (as opposed to Sega's bottom-row alignment).
yeah flat side down was most likely chosen at first because of the enhanced mobility when lock delay doesn't exist. (easier to get the piece out of the way of the stack at high, but sub 1g speeds if more of it's blocks are higher). Ever since, it's had historical precedent, and very few games changed it. And BPS definitely flipped it after they put in lock delay because it makes it easier to slide the pointy pieces. This predates actual SRS, and it's use in SRS itself is historical precedent on their part. It still confuses me. while i'm somewhat competent at ARS (i cleared normal on that Touhou Tetris with it, as opposed to the SRS rotation it was evidently designed for), it takes me a while to get used to the spawns being reversed in SRS every time i go back to it.
History questions: When was the first maxout or sustained level 28 play recorded in NES Tetris ? When was Shirase 1300 first achieved ?
Do you mean surviving Level 19-28? Thor reportedly maxed the game out and reached Level 30 (i.e. 10 lines into the 29 kill-screen) as early as 1990. In the documentary, Robin relates a quote from Thor after his NWC90 win: "if you get past level 30, it's pretty easy to max it out."
I don't recall Shirase in detail but I want to say it was within a couple months of release by several people. The best Death players were ready for it. It definitely wasn't like Master GM which had all this tension for over a year until jin8 finally did it.
