“Just a few years ago, nobody was even close to this,” said MacDonald, who creates Tetris-related content both in name and in reality.game scout”
Willis told The Washington Post that he became obsessed with the original 8-bit NES version of “Tetris” when he entered sixth grade in late summer 2021. He was playing the new version on his Xbox with his brother, but decided to give the classic his edition a try after watching a YouTube video of McDonald’s.
“I like it because it’s easy to learn at first, but it’s really hard to master,” he says of the game, where players organize six different shapes into unbroken rows and erase those rows before the blocks stack up. he said about the game. the top of the screen.
In the roughly two and a half years since then, Willis has emerged as one of the best players in the world. He won a regional tournament, and in October he took third place at the Classic Tetris World Championship, the game’s highest competition. So far he has won prizes ranging from $3,000 to $4,000.
Willis’ mother, Karyn Cox, said she wasn’t worried about her son playing too much Tetris or other video games. Willis estimates he plays an average of two to three hours a day, and he’s been adjusting his playing time well. His other interests include playing the clarinet in his middle school brass band, riding his bicycle, and bowling.
And competitive gaming enriched his life, his mother said. Playing Tetris is about more than just breaking records and winning prizes. Willis has become part of the professional “Tetris” subculture. He has made friends with whom he can “work hard”. His senior players have coached him.
“The community is really great,” she said.
When Willis started playing, software engineers created an AI model to play “Tetris.” stack rabbit McDonald said he reached level 237 before getting a true kill screen. Learning that it could do that led players to take a closer look at the game’s code to find out what could cause the game to freeze.
At the same time, players were learning new, more efficient ways to interact with their controllers. Willis experienced that evolution firsthand when entering the competitive “Tetris” scene. Initially, he, like most other players, used control techniques that were in vogue at the time. hyper tappingplayers can tense their fingers and press buttons quickly.
However, in the months that followed, more and more professionals moved to a new method called “.rolling technique”, the player uses multiple fingers to repeatedly tap the back of the controller in quick succession, forcing the front buttons into the player’s fingers. Willis came to the conclusion that he needed to embrace it if he wanted to compete at the top level.
At the beginning of 2022, he flipped the switch and began a two-year rise to the top level that culminated in the match on December 21st.
Willis was live streaming through the gaming site Twitch, and “Tetris” enthusiasts were quick to congratulate him. In the days leading up to that game, Willis came close to inducing a true kill screen. About 38 minutes into the game that would shake up the world of Tetris, at level 156, he saw an opportunity to drop a block into a space he knew would trigger a kill screen.
“Crash,” he said.
However, he missed the spot and the block continued to slide down the screen.
He then progressed to level 157. After a few seconds, he dropped a blue “L” shape into the left corner, completing the column and vaporizing it. But instead of the next song being spit out, nothing came, and the background music, Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”, was cut and replaced with a monotonous hum.
Some time passed before Willis realized what had happened. Until then, all the millions of Tetris games humans had played had the same ending. The blocks appeared too fast for the player to handle, and if they piled up, the game was over.
When the realization hit him, Willis put his hands on his head, opened his eyes wide, and began taking rapid, deep breaths.
“Oh my god!” he said with a high-pitched wheezing sound.
He slumped in his chair, then stumbled forward, bending over and putting his head in his hands. Followed by a deep breath, oh my god.
“I’m about to pass out,” he said later.
After a few minutes, his breathing slowed and returned to near normal. He laughed, threw his head back, closed his eyes and smiled.
“I’m really shaking.”
Then there was a beat or two of silence, except for the glitched out flatline of the defeated computer.