How NES Tetris's Hardest Mode Was Conquered After 29 Years

there are many difficult achievements that stand out in the history of NES Tetris from a maxout score to level 30 and eventually level 31 but none of them took as long to get on video as a successful completion of nineteen five which for decades was considered to be virtually impossible so what makes it so difficult let's take a look this is the story of a mode that it always seemed just out of reach to the world's top players which includes a breakdown of strategy from the first player ever confirmed to be dead and the revelation of a cork hidden in the game's code that holds the key to conquering it the first thing to understand about 19:5 is that it's played on the second mode of the game the NES Tetris games seen in the world championship matches are played from a type mode on the loading screen where the levels and speed gradually progress upwards as you clear lines and you score as much as possible before the speed becomes too fast on B type you choose a level that remains for the entire game and it ends after you successfully clear 25 lines but there's a second component the six different heights you can choose going from 0 to 5 each height gives you a certain amount of rows of random blocks or garbage on your stream to make it more challenging height zero has as the name would suggest zero lines of garbage height one has three lines height two has five lines type three has eight lines height four has ten lines and finally high five has twelve lines the level number along with the height number you choose for the game becomes the name of the B type mode and is factored into your score on the end screen and similarly to a type where a higher score results in a larger rocket the B type games also have special end screens in fact there's a different one for each level depending on what height you choose on level 0 you'll see up to 6 dragon flies buzzing across the screen on level 1 you'll see doves and it continues up the levels with penguins flying saucers pterodactyls Goodyear blimps ostriches dragons and space shuttles but the level 9 screen is special because it shows various other iconic Nintendo characters if you're on height zero Icarus appears for height one link joins the party high to add Samus hike 3 adds Donkey Kong height 4 as bow and finally on height 5 Mario and Luigi appear dancing while Princess Peach claps and all the towers on top of Saint Basil's Cathedral blasts off into the stratosphere so yeah Mario actually makes a cameo in NES Tetris but anyways that's me type in a nutshell so when you hear a commentator during the World Championships say someone is playing B type and reads looking like B type right now what it means is that Chris bedwell is being a savage but anyways B type has long been a fun puzzle mode used by many as a trainer for various garbage situations you might encounter on a type the one issue is after a certain point level zero through nine becomes so easy that they don't really present much of a challenge when I first started playing nine five looked straight-up impossible to me and now unless I get a completely disastrous piece sequence or I have a catastrophic Mis drop I'm going to be able to beat it like every single time piece of cake so what was it that made nine five go from impossible to possible for me at least the answer was learning how to manage - it's something I've talked about before and I'll probably reach the point soon where I don't need to explain it every video but in case this is the first video you've seen from me here's the 30 second version when you hold down the d-pad to move a piece to the side there's an extra gap of time between the first movement and all subsequent movements that time gap is the delayed auto shift or gasps it works the same way as when you hold down a key on the keyboard there's an extra gap of time between the first letter appearing in all subsequent letters this is done to prevent you from accidentally typing more than one letter per keystroke and the reason is the same in Tetris to prevent you from accidentally moving the piece more than you intended when the game speeds up though this extra time gap is hugely detrimental because at the top of the board you need to move pieces over as fast as possible so there's a bunch of different techniques to remove or minimize this extra time gap or to keep - charged such as wall charges skill stops dead drops and something called the red fireball technique but now what's left to do after 9/5 is no longer difficult it turns out that by holding down the while you press Start you can add 10 levels on top of the level you choose so now 0 1 becomes 10 1 3 2 becomes 13 2 etcetera and this allows for you to play B type on three of the most significant starting levels in the NES Tetris scene 15 18 and 19 15 and 18 are the highest levels within the respective speeds of one drop every four and three frames and are the two levels you can start on in the World Championships and nineteen with its pieces dropping once every two frames is the highest speed you can choose in an unmodified version of the game so 15 18 and 19 are kind of the three most important levels skill wise of B type and I find it fun that you can kind of pinpoint exactly where your own skill level lives by if a certain B type level feels easy difficult or nearly impossible to finish since I was pretty much right in the middle of the 172 qualifying scores for the most recent classic Tetris monthly I'll be using myself as kind of a quick litmus test of how hard a couple of these modes might be for an average player so let's start things off with like 15 for here okay so even with going up from like level 9 to level 15 if you have control of Dass you can still get pieces over to the side not that hard and you can do it pretty high up piece of cake again now let's ramp things up a bit with 15 5 okay so this is a decent board to start but the thing that's immediately different about 15 5 is that little bit of extra height makes things a lot harder and shoot I had a little bit of moment of miss loss - oh and there we go 15 5 is definitely harder oh my gosh finally alright so let's kick things up a notch with level 18 now level 18 it's significantly harder than level 15 you cannot move pieces to the side nearly as much but still 18 3 if you know what you're doing and you don't miss drop it's not that hard still all right there we go eighteen floor though I'm nervous about attempting this one alright let's let's let's try here gosh darn it yes chase and now eighteen five do I even want to attempt this one gosh yikes [Music] dang it I'm just gonna say eighteen five is out of my league and call it there so let's kick things up to level nineteen a level 19 again the hardest level you can start on in an unmodified version of the game almost did it with a Tetris there but there nineteen one conquered now what about nineteen - it's still kind of low but thing is on level 19 you have to like immediately be having the piece go in the trajectory you want otherwise it just won't get there with - I'll shoot alright feel like I got a little lucky there cuz now if we go up to nineteen three I mean shoot oh I really have very few options just with gas see the only time the game's throwing me a bone here is right at the beginning where there's a little bit of a pause so I can put the first piece kind of where I want but after that like oh my goodness lord help you five lines five lines level nineteen high three there's not even bad for me so that's my chart placing the top modes I'm really comfortable on as 15 for eighteen three and nineteen one a seasoned competitor is able to do better World Championship veteran Josh towles has a training regimen on his youtube channel and that's what you're gonna want to do listen you need to master these skills to be an elite player you want to be able to be 15 5 18 4 and 19 - every single time you play those are very similar difficulty levels at different speeds in part to Josh talks about 18 5 and 19 3 being his stretch goals thus the chart of an elite competitor in the tournament's look something like this so what's left on the charts well what about nineteen four well nineteen four is barely beatable only by the most elite dash players such as green tea who is a TGM Grandmaster or Jonas Neubauer the seven-time classic Tetris world champion and even then it's a real challenge because you're incredibly limited at what you can do with - at high heights on level 19 since the pieces lot nearly instantly to the stack and don't slide around like they do in modern Tetris becoming a Protoss player essentially involves memorizing exactly how far each piece can move with fully charged - so you know what moves are even possible and because the pieces spin with a bias towards the right it's very hard to get stuck to the left for example on level 19 a line piece cannot move over a left well that is more than six rows high without something called a last-second tap Josh explains the last second tap in part two of his training regimen when he get to this second to last column you're gonna manually tap it left one more time within that six frame window basically it takes advantage of the first horizontal movement from attack being instantaneous by timing an additional tap exactly right to move the piece an extra column over this especially advanced technique allowed him to eventually join the 19 for club earlier this year but last-second taps are hard to pull off consistently even a successful one has its drawbacks as it typically sacrifices the Dass of the next piece a 19 force garbage goes up 10 rows anyways moving a line piece here on anything other than the first piece is straight-up impossible using - even with a quick tab so how do you overcome the limitations of - well you bypass it all together with manual tapping enter the world of hyper tapping if you can tap your finger at more than 10 times a second or 10 Hertz you can move the pieces to the side faster than - for a long time elite hyper Stoppers were incredibly rare after all not only do you physically have to be able to do it you also still have to have that deep knowledge and experience in how to stack aside from long retired 1990 Nintendo world champion through Kurland Japanese Grandmaster chorion and the mysterious Dan Z who never competed in any major tournaments there weren't many others who had ever done it at a high level but in 2018 Joseph Sayle burst into the scene able to consistent at unprecedented speeds and after practicing for hours nearly every day for a year he won the 2018 World Championships in October in a triumphant rookie debut shortly afterwards that December Joseph got his first 19 for able to zip pieces over to the side with ease and I find it maybe a little bit representative of the difference in difficulty of playing nineteen four with hyper tapping versus - by comparing Joseph and Jonas's reactions to completing it thirties yes it's alright that would make then an approximate chart for Hyper tappers and maybe the best of the best - players but there was still one stage that no one had ever recorded themselves beating nineteen five at a staggering 12 lines of garbage nineteen five is so frustrating to attempt that most people don't even bother trying it had just been considered virtually impossible since the game came out in 1989 maybe feasible with a perfect board in perfect moves but I was going to sit down and do that myself and many others thought Joseph was going to be the first one to crack it but after a few sporadic attempts he appeared to lose interest thaw Rock Orleans might have gotten it way back in the day but without any video it's impossible to know for sure if or how he would have done it by 2019 however a new generation of hyper tappers had emerged onto the scene the online tournament classic tetris monthly had a rapid climb and talent level hosting rising tapping stars such as nano and richard who would eventually win monthly titles and pmy a who actually made it significantly far into a 19-5 attempt before missed robbing a piece at the most unfortunate of moments and then right before the 2019 World Championships I was researching and gathering information on new competitors for my preview video a hyper tapper by the name of Mark had just won the Germany qualifier to win a free trip in a guaranteed spot in the World Championships in Portland and when I looked at his YouTube channel to my shock he had just put up a video of himself completing 19:5 which to this day still has less than 300 views after years of people wondering if this would ever be possible it felt like looking at a straight-up miracle [Music] and it's the a swimming straight fight that they were trying to develop Knowles his vices miss Fletcher Microsoft or establish me the estimation of the various B motor slugs and finish after he was right 29 years and 10 months after the game was originally released this was indeed the first successful 19-5 ever captured on video so I called him up to ask him about this crazy achievement how long did it take you to beat NCSC 19:5 I will give you a short answer and after that a little bit of story okay the short answer is 20 minutes 20 minutes what well it would only be fitting of someone like mark how did you originally get involved in NES Tetris I played a little bit of Tetris of NES Tetris actually as a little kid but I think like everyone I got involved in competitive NES Tetris with YouTube videos but not the boom Tetris for Jeff video I just got the normal CWC videos in my recommendations that kind of snowballed into what it is now for me I seriously started I would say a month before CDW's see Germany 2018 before that I played just a little bit for fun unfortunately mark didn't show up to the qualifying stations in 2018 until the day was almost over I knew it too late so he came came 50 minutes before end of qualifiers and I saw the city yeah that was like okay I could try to make some scores but but I didn't make it because I was just too late well I mean you took matters in your own hands you're like next year we just wait after being inspired at the 2018 Germany tournament mark practiced hard for next year's event by playing on a Powell console local to his region only to find out at the last minute that instead of Powell the tournament would be on NTSC like it is in the world championships despite having to adjust to the new speeds practically on the fly mark still managed to win how long have you been playing NTSC Tetris three days three days so how exactly did mark beat 19-5 sorry about that it's like I actually I tried to be mode 19 for for about one hour but I couldn't finish it after that I went on my discord server and I asked the people like how many people have a beaten b'moth 19:4 and they fought me like this guy and this guy and I was like and what about nineteen five how many people beat wet and the people on my server told me like no one has officially beaten it and it's kind of impossible and more like a meme thing or something and yeah I took that as a challenge and the next day I try it for like 20 minutes and I just got it after 20 minutes very a very important part maybe even the most important is the very first block if you start a new game you can like move the first block around a little bit before it will start for the first block is pretty much free you can place it anywhere you can't get very much blocks to the left the best thing you want to do is you want to place the first block on the left the best case is if you have like on the far left on the first column like a hole and you can fill the soul with the first block so first block should be like an IP zone JP's you can see after I put that JP's into this hole the top left side is completely filled up and I was very lucky about the board because on the right side there was also a little bit photo looks after the first block I just had to place two blocks in the of Plainfield and after you burnt the solid field left side down I think the most important block after that is an L block because if you have a hole on the left that is really high you won't be able to get like a long bar into the sole so you need an out piece to placed flat on the left but still get like on the LPS with little thing into the hole on the left after you did that you should be burnt down enough to just play normally or relatively normally and to flat and clever burning where can the audience watch more of your play obviously on my youtube channel I upload all my PBS I'm planning on starting the streams every scene on Twitch of course that's you can watch me play so that's how 19-5 was finally conquered but shortly after our interview mark contacted me to let me know that another player incredibly had also completed 19-5 a young tapper named jake and incredibly he and managed to do it a staggering six times so who exactly was this Jake I reached out to talk to him as well and eventually he would reveal a final clue that explained how 19:5 needed to be approached my name is Jake 14 years old I got into NES Tetris in February of 2018 at that time period Tetris was releasing for PC and I was sort of just interested in a lot of Tetris at the time and I had just done some research on the NWC in 1990 so I had already known about Thor a : so I got a sort of interested in classic Tetris I played us for about the first 4 or 5 months and once I'd maxed out I felt like I had sort of reached a limit I couldn't play aggressive enough to get anything higher than what I'd already had I saw a video of Richard playing level 29 on the tetris ridet and I thought yeah I remember seeing Thor do that I should try to do that maybe I'd be able to play a little higher so I took a bunch of time to learn and it worked out in the end Jake gained widespread recognition when he won his first major tournament at Tetris Canada 2019 I feel like that was a pretty big moment for me because I was never really sure if I was even good at classic Tetris in any way but by going to CDW see Canada and actually performing well under like sort of pressure I sort of felt like a little more confident that I knew what I was doing so how long did it take for you to beat nineteen five what's funny about that is it only really took about twenty minutes wait really yeah the thing about nineteen five it it isn't as hard as he'd expect it to be the crazy thing is that mark gave the exact same really he said about twenty minutes yeah that because it really didn't take that long the fact that he gave the same answer that's insane like the exact same amount of minutes to that is hilarious that was not planned at all just saying I'm not coming to this with a script that's totally genuine there so what was Jake's experience like with the infamous nineteen five I think there's a line of code in the game that makes the top-left corner of the board always empty and that's really annoying for nineteen five because it's hard to get anything over there Jake wasn't being superstitious here he's actually right two-time world finalist Alex Kurt discovered the quark while working on a task project and documented it on his user page for the tetris wiki the game's code will always inadvertedly delete any garbage in the upper leftmost square on B type so it appears that marks strategy of immediately solving the left may not just be a potential solution but a necessary one there was a reason Jake who would eventually win two monthly titles had been nineteen five six times in addition to blazingly fast tapping he had also figured out the reliable method for success so the biggest help on nineteen five is having a board generated that already has the left mostly built out and it only needs one piece and if you get that piece as your first one you have like a big delay where you can just move the piece over and then you can just sort of clear on the right and then it's only nineteen for Hyatt at that point there was a moment about two-thirds of the way through where you seemingly had it cleared and then you miss dropped a tea piece yeah okay so there's a reason why that happened I was in a discord call with a few friends in CCM and they made me laugh and that's the biggest trouble for a hyper tapper I'd say your whole arm just shuts down there's nothing you can do about that I'm surprised I even managed to clear that up where can viewers watch more of your gameplay well you can watch me on Twitch I stream nearly every day you can also find me on my youtube under the same name where I post either offline games that are personal bests or just general stuff from my twitch that it feels noteworthy and some of them which have awesome mspaint thumbnails yeah I always do that for the big ones because I feel like it helps them stand out over the next six months a handful of emerging stars have also managed to complete nineteen five such as Eric icx sodium overdose and poet 13 Joseph Sayle also managed to finally join the very exclusive club in April 2020 but something I find really cool about Marc and Jake the two 19 5 pioneers is that they first made their mark in the tetris world not at the World Championships but at local tournaments from their home countries during the first few years of competitive classic Tetris history the World Championships on the west coast of the United States happened to be the only major in-person tournament and the talent pool was pretty much exclusively American but nowadays there's tournaments everywhere and it's truly become a global scene so do you have any upcoming projects I've heard something about a classic Tetris Germany yes and so we have like this it's like a our organization we are like people from Germany from Austria from Switzerland and from Luxembourg like all the german-speaking countries we have a discard server and like Facebook page and all that stuff we keep tracks of our PBS and have like high schoolers but the best thing in my opinion about us we also have like local tournaments we do them in all Germany different people organize them and all the informations about the upcoming tournaments can be found on our disco server and our Facebook page I'd actually like to give a shout out to CTA BC Canada because there's another one happening in 2020 it'd be useful for people to know that it's happening so they could keep an eye out for that despite things temporarily being put on hold due to social distancing if you live in either of these areas and are interested in playing competitive NES Tetris I definitely recommend getting involved in the online communities linked in the description so that when the coast is clear you'll be able to know where and when the events are happening so you can be able to attend and one more thing to note classic Tetris Germany is played on PAL Tetris the version of Tetris that Mark had to switch over from Anna's qualifier so what makes it different well there's so much to cover with that it's a topic for a whole nother video stay tuned [Music] you [Music]

Channel: aGameScout

Views: 580,351

Rating: 4.9246421 out of 5

Keywords: 19-5, nes tetris, nes tetris 1989, joseph saelee tetris, jakegames2 tetris, classic tetris world championships, classic tetris germany, tetris canada, marq tetris, deusx tetris, classic tetris, classic tetris world record, nes tetris 19-5, retro gaming, james chen

Id: Cx4RlkzPuys

Length: 24min 20sec (1460 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Tetra-76]

This is a fantastic video, I hope it gains some traction

[u/Poobslag]

Great watch, loved every minute of it. The intro where he attempts the different levels himself helps demonstrate how hard it is -- and then the interviews at the end were great too, helps the viewer appreciate that these are human beings and not just names.

[u/Mogling]

Loved this, very informative and well put together.

[u/UNHchabo]

Here's a link to the gameplay video.

[u/e6c]

Great video. Enjoy the long bar.