This is gonna be a breakdown of the most
insane comeback in classic tetris history. It was so remarkable there was even some
controversy over whether it was cheated, and I’ll be breaking that down as well. So first, a little bit of
context to the tournament. For most of competitive NES Tetris history,
virtually all players used the built in piece movement of the game when you hold down
the buttons - known as playing with “DAS”. In recent years, hypertapping
and rolling have emerged as the dominant playstyles as they are
able to move the pieces much faster, but a significant portion of the competitive
community has remained fans of the DAS playstyle, both for nostalgic reasons and for the interest of
seeing what players can do within its limitations. It was for this reason that community member
and player Scamper spent the last several months organizing the Classic Tetris DAS real
tournament - a massive 64 player bracket exclusively played within the limitations of DAS. After dozens of matches, and a crowdfunded prize
pool that rose up to 1200 dollars, it was only fitting that one of the finalists was PixelAndy,
the #1 seed and a true titan of the Tetris Community who had made the world finals in 2020
and world semifinals in 2021. He was an expert with DAS, having started out as a DAS player
before later learning hypertapping and rolling. The other finalist, NGC man, was a very strong
player in his own right with an impressive resume of achievements, most notably holding
the world record on a level 19 start with DAS, but he was definitely the underdog here. In the Best of 7 match, he’d managed to hold
on long enough to make it go the distance, as both players were now tied at 3
games apiece in the 7th deciding game, but, to put it bluntly, by this point,
NGC man basically screwed. How screwed? Well, with DAS, the most significant
barrier is the level speeds. While the newer playstyles can play for
quite a long time - the current world record in NTSC is Level 95 by roller EricICX,
with DAS, players hit a hard wall at Level 29, the fastest speed in the game, where the
pieces can no longer reliably move to the side. So in head to head matches, where the
highest score at the end of the game wins, DAS players must try to score
all their points before level 29. So at this moment, PixelAndy is massively ahead by nearly 200,000 points, which is the
equivalent of a 5.74 tetris lead. That’s bad enough, but NGC man is in the middle
of level 26 at 206 lines, meaning he is very close to level 29 which comes at 230 lines. The
pace potential statistic shows what each player could score if they play perfectly until level 29.
NGC man has enough lines left to get 6 tetrises, which is 4 lines at once, the most valuable line
clear, along with 3 lines to spare - for a maximum potential score of 915,000, which would barely
put him back in the lead over Andy’s 896,000. Problem is, Andy’s still playing, and
his pace potential is over 1 million. And to make matters even worse, NGC
man is about to misdrop a Z piece and burn a single. Not only does that
use up one of his 3 spare line clears, he now must now waste the other two lines clearing
off these rows to get back to a clean stack, and then play perfectly all the way
until level 29 to even have a chance. And even though he gets a tetris to start
clawing back, Andy’s board is perfectly clean, he skims away a line while keeping his tetris well
open, then scores a tetris to go up to 932,000, which is now higher than NGC Man’s
maximum scoring potential at 911,000. So Andy has now seemingly
put the game out of reach. The best NGC man can do is play
perfectly and come one tetris short. But he does have the optimal setup to clear away
the top two rows of the Z piece and manages to do so cleanly, so he is in position to try for
a perfect run of tetrises. But in clearing away the Z piece, he’s now transferred
his tetris well over to the center, which is more difficult to maintain, and Andy has
another Tetris set up but ends up burning a line with an S piece that doesn’t cleanly resolve,
right as NGC man has gotten another tetris. Andy is now scrambling to try and reopen the well, but he’s on level 28 and
quickly running out of time. NGC man gets another Tetris,
continuing to play perfectly, and Andy ends up burning
into level 29 at 230 lines, unable to do anything more. Still, though, he
seemingly scored enough to clutch out the victory. But NGC man is still going, he scores another
tetris, and is now down only 2.8 tetrises, 3 tetrises would win it. He continues stacking, he cannot
make a single error at this point, his board is getting very uneven but he gets
a line piece just in time for another tetris, and is set up for one more, but this
is seemingly the end of the road. NGC man is at 229 lines. One more
line clear of any kind will get him into level 29. He needs two more tetrises to win. It should be impossible. But there
is one last thing he can try to do, and in fact, the misdrop of the Z piece two
levels earlier put him in position to do it. He would not be able to get a line piece over
to the right side for a tetris on level 29, but, now that his well is moved to the center, if
he could somehow set up for 2 tetrises, he would be able to get an extra tetris on level 29 without
having to move the line piece to the sides. He needs 8 perfect rows of setup to do
this, he has 6, and is still stacking, waiting for something to the left, he
doesn’t take a tetris with the line piece and instead just barely gets it over
to the left. He knows what he has to do, and now has 8 rows set up, but he now needs
two line pieces in very quick succession. His board’s up too high. He can no
longer move pieces fully to the side. But there’s one line piece. He puts it
down the center, barely maneuvers two pieces off to the side and gets a line
piece for the extra tetris on level 29! In one moment, he wins the game, he
wins the match, he wins the entire tournament! He can’t believe it, he runs
across the room, falling to his knees, this is perhaps the most incredible
finish to any classic tetris game ever. Getting an extra tetris on level 29 (with
DAS) in competition is incredibly rare, and across over 27,000 recorded competitive
matches, it’s only happened a handful of times. In April 2018, Greentea did it
against Koryan in the Classic Tetris Monthly Finals, but still lost by 1 tetris. In November 2020, in his last match ever, the
7 time world champion Jonas did it against huffulufugus in the world championships
top 16, and again, still lost by 1 tetris. In October 2021, AdmMts did it against Moja in
the early rounds of the world championships, but he was several tetrises behind and
not close to completing a comeback. And in March 2022, bendy did it against
lio in the CTM Tier 1 Community Tournament, and again, still came 1 tetris short. This was not only the first time, according to
NGC man, that he had ever gotten an extra tetris on level 29 with DAS, it was the first time
a DAS player had ever done it to win a game, let alone with an entire tournament
and prize pool on the line. But as with many legendary performances,
sometimes there is suspicion of cheating, and an investigation was opened after
some players pointed to a suspicious move NGC man made while setting up the extra tetris. Basically, one of the hard limits of DAS
is that from levels 19-28, you cannot stack a line piece vertically higher than 6 rows on
the left with just the built in piece movement. But at this moment, when NGC man is trying
to build out the left side of his stack, he gets a line piece over 7 rows high. Now, this isn’t immediately convicting, because he could have used an
advanced move called a quicktap. The simplified explanation of a quicktap
is that DAS is sluggish on all side to side movements except the first one, where
it moves over on the very next frame. So quicktaps take advantage of this. A famous
example is when greentea used a quicktap to save himself in the 2018 world semifinals. Right
as the line piece is one row away from the side, greentea uses a perfectly timed second tap to
get the piece over with the first frame movement. Quicktaps are still considered to be within
the umbrella of the DAS playstyle, because unlike hypertapping, which uses rapid
button presses for every piece movement, Quicktaps do not use button presses
for consecutive horizontal movements. But here’s the problem. If you look at Greentea’s quicktap, the final two movements are the ones
that are supposed to happen quickly. With NGC man, when you slow down the tape, the
two quickest movements happen in the middle, which would seem to suggest that
NGC man hypertapped faster than the native limitations of DAS, which
would be blatantly against the rules. NGC man was adamant that he quicktapped,
but so much was at stake that his title was temporarily rescinded so that
the evidence could be examined. And another community member, fractal,
ended up figuring out what happened. Because the game was livestreamed, several of
the frames ended up getting lost in the live broadcast, giving an inaccurate representation
of the piece movement in slow motion playback. But when fractal looked at the location
of the line piece on the board compared to where it should be if it were
quicktapped, it was a perfect match. This was pretty conclusive proof that
NGC man actually did quick tap the piece, as the chances of him hypertapping in exactly the
same way as a quicktap are infinitesimally small. The investigation was closed,
and NGC man’s title was restored. Fractal even went the extra mile and reverse
engineered the seed location for the piece sequence that NGC man was on at the end of
the game and experimented with different placements to find several alternate solutions
that would’ve given an extra tetris as well, including this ultra-cheeky solution
with a vertical I-tuck setup. Which is a good segue to address the only
reason anyone might have to critique NGC man’s performance, which is, didn’t
he just get lucky with the pieces? Well, yeah, of course he did. But anyone can get lucky pieces. It takes a truly elite player to take
advantage of the pieces in the way NGC man did under incredible pressure and
play the last 3 levels to perfection, including pulling off the risky
quicktap to set up the final tetris. NGC man’s victory was very well deserved,
and a fitting tribute to the DAS playstyle. And as it so happens, Scamper’s
Classic Tetris DAS tournament isn’t the only DAS tournament happening this year. It was just announced this past
week that there’s going to be a live World Cup of DAS in Germany on
the 20th and 21st of August. And if the previous tournaments
held in Germany are any indication, it will most likely be a very well run event. If you are interested in finding out more
or attending, I will have a link to their discord page in the description, along with
a link to SirMaser’s video about it as well. And if you’re interested in seeing the
full match between NGC Man and andy, it’s going to be uploaded to the classic tetris
monthly youtube channel along with the rest of the top 8. Thanks for watching,
and I’ll see you in the next one.
