FAKE Tetris High Scores Get Exposed

tetris one of the most popular games ever created with a presence on almost every platform since its wide scale release in the 80s with popularity comes competition and there's perhaps no competitive era more storied in tetris than the race for the first score of 1.3 million within a few months of each other two different players would post scores that surpassed the 1.3 barrier one who had been steadily grinding the game and another who seemingly came out of nowhere today we'll be looking at both of these cases as they highlight a few creative methods that can be employed to catch false claims and illegitimate runs if you are unfamiliar with tetris it's not a hard game to understand as it takes place on a single screen the object of the game is to amass a high score by clearing lines from the field of play which are made with different tetraminos or play blocks there are a total of seven different blocks and the game spawns a random one for you to place on the board if you arrange blocks in an unbroken line from left to right the line will clear and you will gain score with the highest scoring moves coming when a line piece is slotted into a stack of lines for high you are able to move blocks left and right with the d-pad and using the a and b buttons you can rotate pieces to help organize the stack that you're building the pieces fall to the bottom when they're spawned and as you clear lines and increment your score the level of the game goes up which increases the speed at which the blocks fall this is where the difficulty of tetris ramps up and as we'll see later a number of techniques popped up to help deal with the speed of the game at higher levels and now that we have a basic understanding we're ready to look at the first case the first case we're looking at comes from early october in 2019 when several members were streaming attempts on the same feed using a software called netrust99 a program created for group style play so that streamers didn't have to capture feed from eight different players but instead takes their input data and puts it into a game feed with upscaled ui during this session a player under the name mudus would get on a run that saw him break the 1 million point barrier and as he moved into level 29 the rate the pieces were falling became too much and he stacked out with a final score of 1.28 million the current record was a 1.29 million by tyler p putting murus just a few tetrises away from scoring a world record the problem was this wasn't the real mudus the real mudus had a pb around 800k at the time the player behind this game goes by the name pmya pmya had a high score of 1.16 million at the time meaning he was within a reasonable distance of achieving a 1.28 much closer than moodus which begs the question why did he play under another player's name to begin with but the story doesn't end here two months later joseph sailey would score the first 1.3 million in history on december 28th and it was just a week after this that pmya posted a screenshot from an emulator of a 1.3 score of his own there were two problems with this score claim the biggest was that it had no video and at the high level this is a necessity for any score close to a world record the second is that it came from emulator and while not banned in competition it strongly encouraged for high-level players to play on original hardware that's where things were supposed to end as a score without video proof isn't terribly interesting on its own but a community member who was working on a tool that analyzes rng seeds for tetris put pmya's 1.28 score into the software and it determined that the seed he played on wasn't possible to understand what this means we need to look at how rng works in tetris when determining what pieces it will spawn during a game on the technical side the game uses something called a linear feedback shift register or lfsr to produce randomness while this sounds technical all that you need to know is that an lfsr is performing an xor function on a sequence of bits in memory if you've never heard of an xor it's quite easy to understand it's a logic gate that will only return true if one of the inputs is true and as it operates on the bit sequence it changes the value of the lfsr when it comes to tetris this rng equation runs every frame from power on and when the game starts it continues running as pieces fall on the board this means that the real randomness comes from the player's inputs as you can affect how many frames pass before the next piece is generated by delaying or speeding up when the active block hits the stack the thing about the lfsr method is that it isn't truly random as it starts from the same point every time so by counting the frames between when pieces touch the stack you can analyze a seed and see if the pieces being generated are correct to the lfsr you may be thinking that it's possible to predict what's coming next since the lfsr method isn't truly random and that the players can affect the rng in a way that's advantageous to them but there are two issues with this line of thought while players have solved entire seeds for rng it's a method that requires them to memorize the entire sequence of piece spawning and then play perfectly while executing the seed and it's blatantly obvious to someone acquainted with tetris to identify when a solved seed is being played the second issue is that while lfsr rng can be predicted doing it in real time without analyzing the seed beforehand is almost impossible as the equations it runs while predictable aren't easy enough that you can do them in your head while playing when the rng tool was ran over pmya's game it determined that the rng seed when he was playing on level 29 shouldn't have occurred until the game had been played out to the 11 minute mark but since his game only ran for about 8 minutes something was clearly wrong another player that had created a similar tool for looking at rng was consulted and after the two of them analyzed the game they came to the conclusion that the opening sequence had a different rng seed than the seed at the end of the game how this happened wasn't immediately clear but given that the seed was impossible the score was dismissed as fake and close to two years later pmya would admit that the video was spliced but i wanted his side of the story and he was kind enough to reply and here's what he had to say the 1.2 game was initially supposed to be a joke i just recorded a pre-transition paused made a save state then played post transition a few times until i got a good one then stitch them together the joke being that the name of the player showed on stream was nowhere near good enough to get a score that high at the time i had a 1.16 and was basically going to get a 1.2 within the next few weeks so i just kind of rolled with it given that the 1.2 was fake what about the 1.3 pmya maintains that the 1.3 is legit but admits that it is unverifiable given that there's no video and in fact he said he's achieved two separate 1.3 scores i'm not going to dig into the authenticity of those two scores since there's only a screenshot so i'll leave it up to you to decide on their legitimacy i'd like to preface this next case by saying that it's not an instance of cheating or wrongdoing it's just a fun story that shows some of the interesting methods that high score claims can be debunked with even when evidence is lacking if you recall i mentioned that the high score at the time of pmyas 1.28 was a 1.29 by tyler p which happened on stream in june of 2019 but the funny thing about tyler is that he wasn't a real person or at least there's strong evidence that he wasn't playing under his real identity so let's break it down the timeline for tyler is pretty straightforward he came onto the scene in the beginning of 2019 and on june 10th he achieved a world record of 1.29 live on stream shortly after he claimed he set a 1.3 million back in the mid 90s but didn't have any form of proof to back this up as 2019 progressed tyler stated that he would be attending a qualifier for the classic tetris world championship but then changed his story saying he would be in germany and couldn't make the event at which point he became inactive and soon disappeared from the scene when it comes to the scores he said on stream these aren't in dispute as there's no evidence to suggest that they are fake so i'd like to focus on the 1.3 he claims to have achieved in the mid 90s normally when you're playing tetris on the nes your score becomes capped once you hit 999 000 due to how the game was coded to display score in pmya's case you saw scores over 1 million because the software used to squad stream calculated each player's score and displayed it correctly but this didn't exist in the 90s to know the precise score once you max it out or reach the kill screen as players refer to it you can do two things tally the score by hand which would require a video that tyler didn't have or use a game genie code if you put this code into a game genie when you max the score out the first digit of the number will be replaced by a letter with b signifying 1 c signifying 2 and so on all you need to do to tally your full score is add 1 million points the only problem is this method wasn't discovered until 2015 by josh tolis so if tyler had no video and probably wasn't using a game genie he likely didn't set a 1.3 in the mid 90s but there's another reason why this score likely didn't happen and it's to do with the style of grip he uses currently there are three different grip styles that players use das hyper tapping and rolling and by looking at each of these we can cast even more doubt on tyler's claim to 1.3 when tetris released on the nes in 1989 das was the only play style that players used and going into the late 2000s it was still the predominant mode of play das stands for delayed auto shift and just refers to how the game shifts a block when the directional button is held for nes tetris das simulates 10 inputs per second when held and with the game running at 60 frames per second this makes play at the higher levels very difficult as the blocks will be falling faster than a das player can move them to the sides of the stack hyper tappers on the other hand will mash as fast as they can to generate more presses per second than das this technique becomes effective once you can tap at 12 presses per second which adds a barrier of entry as it takes a lot of practice to get your mash this fast but has come to dominate competition in recent years the last method of play is rolling and it's a clever technique that allows for a mash speed above 20 presses per second once you get the hang of it by gripping the controller a certain way you can roll your fingers across the back to force it into the fingers of your other hand which is a lot less stressful than the requirements for effective hyper tapping so what does this have to do with tyler's score rolling was just discovered as a technique earlier this year so there's no way he was using it back in the 90s and in his high score video from 2019 it's clear that tyler is hyper tapping hyper tapping didn't become popular until 2018 when joseph sailey used it to defeat jonas neubauer in the classic tetris world championship it wasn't viewed as a viable strategy until the last decade as it has a high learning curve that deterred players from adopting it which led to a lack of overall confidence in it as a technique it's highly unlikely tyler was hyper tapping back then as thor ackerland the winner of the nintendo world championships in 1990 is the only confirmed hyper tapper from that period and if we look at when each style of play achieved a documented 1.3 it casts even more doubt on tyler's claim when it comes to rolling it not only broke the 1.3 threshold since it was discovered but has went on to shatter score records in ways that weren't thought possible previously with hydrant dude getting the first 1.6 score which has since been broken by multiple players as far as hyper tapping is concerned it broke the 1.3 mark when joseph sailey set the first ever on december 28 2019 and das players didn't see a 1.3 until tristop set one on june 28 2021 since rolling wasn't a technique when tyler was playing there's no way he used it for a 1.3 and given that hyper tapping only had one practitioner in the 90s and didn't come to prominence until the last 5 years it's likely he wasn't using this grip as well this leaves das and since it didn't get a verified 1.3 until mid 2021 it means that tyler was either ahead of the curve by 25 years or it simply didn't happen i'll leave that for you to decide which leaves one question who was tyler p before we get to tyler p's identity i'd like to announce a new bounty for classic tetris since the stories covered today involved world record level claims i thought it would be fun to create a bounty for the next verified high score world record the best part about this bounty is that it's on the game ventures platform which means that the prize money is all community funded so anyone is free to contribute to the prize pool there are some proof requirements that need to be followed when submitting a claim so be sure to check those out before submitting and if you're going to stream attempts please include tetris challenge in your stream title so people following this can pop in and follow along with the action happy hunting and now the conclusion of the tyler p saga it's very rare for a player to shoot to the top of any leaderboard in just a few short months although it does happen there are several factors to look at when it comes to tyler's stream and the quality of the games he was playing the first thing to notice is that the score of the games tyler was playing in may and june were of very high quality which comes as no surprise since he set a world record in this period but something peculiar happened as he continued to play into the summer the scores that tyler was posting continued to be high level but the rate at which he was getting past the kill screen dropped with a noticeable decline in the overall level of play the going theory is that there were two people in control of the tyler p account so who were they in the first half of the tyler saga there were only four players with the chops to put up the 1.29 world record and only two of them were hyper tappers corian and joseph sayley it's very unlikely that corion was behind tyler p which leaves only one possibility joseph sayley a tetris community member named zelis did a video comparing the audio and video output of tyler's stream with joseph's and he came to the conclusion that the two feeds were exactly the same putting little doubt as to who was behind the tyler p account a year after the tyler saga joseph would admit to being the force behind tyler all along and having been the one to set the 129 score on the account which leaves who inherited the account later in the summer of 2019. all i can say on this is that it could have been any high level player because things get a little crazy from players posting cryptic coded messages alluding to the identity of tyler to multiple alt accounts being used that play on tyler's username it's a rabbit hole that's not worth exploring while tyler may have been world champion joseph sailey it wasn't a surprise to a lot of the community as he's known for having fun with everyone from time to time such as announcing his retirement on april fools then posting a new world record of 1.4 million later the same day i hope you enjoyed these stories from competitive tetris and if you'd like to see a similar video please check out this one i did on mario kart 64. i'd also like to shout out my patreon as i'm now doing youtube full time and your support matters more than ever so if you want sneak peeks and updates about what i'm working on click the link below thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Abyssoft

Views: 566,119

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Id: cox0SZYUicc

Length: 16min 21sec (981 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 26 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/soggyplod]

Cheating aside, can we please just marvel that new techniques to play this game literally came about this year. Just boggles the mind that a game as old as this and people are still improving on their tech to beat it.

I salute you gamers.

[u/rageofbaha]

Its incredible that after this many years people are still getting better

[u/kinhorn495]

Great content covering one of the most intense classic games we have been blessed with.