World Record Progression: NES Tetris No Piece Rotation

playing nes tetris without rotating the pieces has long been considered an amusing novelty as it was never expected that you could get very far that is until recently this is the story of a record that stayed dormant for months years possibly even decades until it was suddenly beaten multiple times by players nobody expected i'll be interviewing several of the world record holders along the way so let's get started [Music] the story begins with ben mullen at the 2010 midwest gaming classic in milwaukee wisconsin ben won a tetris tournament that featured a surprise rule in the finals where peace rotations were not allowed he managed to clear six lines when i reached out to ben last month to ask what his personal best for no rotation was he told me he actually had a note that he got 25 lines back in the 90s but unfortunately he didn't have a video so he didn't want to claim it as a world record until it was matched or broken and until quite recently that would have been the world record there wasn't a single prominent mention of a no rotation achievement for many years outside of ben mullen's game being mentioned at the beginning of the documentary ecstasy of order and when you try to play in this mode it's not hard to see why the pieces spawn horizontally meaning the maximum amount of lines you can clear at once is two the long bar normally the most important piece used for tetris's is demoted to pretty much the least helpful piece wreaking havoc on boards that can't accommodate it cleanly the strategic gambling nature of the game is turned up to 11 with the player constantly handling extremely vulnerable peace dependencies so let's fast forward 9 years by 2019 nes tetris had become a phenomenon due to the viral success of the world championships on youtube a new generation of players had appeared populating twitch and discord the first person mentioned to do no rotation games is a player with a screen named doggo doggo woofwoof from finland who tried doing them starting from level 19. i guess the attitude was hey this challenge is already sort of weird and hard why not make it even harder by starting on the highest level possible unfortunately all of doggo's online profiles have been removed and no trace of his no rotation games remain but one day shortly afterwards a bunch of players including three who went by screen names coffee hydrant dude and playing challenged each other to try and do no rotation games on the classic tetris monthly discord's main voice chat as far as can be remembered the games were pretty casual a couple players got a handful of lines on level 18 starts but afterwards blank was inspired to try and shoot for even more lines by starting on a lower level and on october 7th 2019 the first no rotation personal best appeared on the discord when blank posted a screenshot of 16 lines from a level zero start when hydra dude mentioned that this had to be better than his level 19 no ro personal best blank wondered if this might be the world record an hour later he followed up with a full video of 17 lines and a mini race was on hydrant dude responded another hour later with a 21 lines video some players speculated that this record might be just all luck based and hydrant responded that it only took him a few attempts so probably not but then aside from a 24 lion game that didn't count because it was accidentally played on a modded version hydrant couldn't make any more progress on his world record maybe he had gotten lucky at first and this record wasn't as easy as initially thought blank also tried more no rotation games but although he slightly increased his personal best to 19 lines neither he nor anybody else could break hydrant's mark but on october 10th coffee finally broke through getting 24 lines legitimately and setting what seems to be the definitive world record blank remarked in amazement that coffee had gotten four lines into the no row kill screen aka level two and i gotta say coffee's video title and thumbnail are top notch he's well on his way to becoming a professional youtuber over the next few days coffee did some runs on 18 and 19 but activity with the overall line's world record seemed to dissipate and things would settle with coffee as the undisputed no-ro champion for quite some time seven months later in may of 2020 tavern of heart scored 24 lines as well but she wouldn't even realize it was a tied world record until the category got mentioned on discord again a few weeks later and then on august 9th 2020 i had started making weekly videos about nes tetris and was looking for video topics i asked publicly on the discord what the world record was and was pointed to coffee so i set up an interview with him on strategies for no rotation i remembered ben mullen's game from the documentary so i reached out to him and found his historical personal best and finally i live streamed myself attempting to get the no rotation world record i only ended up getting 15 lines but it helped me get hands-on experience in understanding the place tile and it seems that by publicly chattering about this record i inadvertently set off something the next day i was frantically trying to edit the video to get it up on time when coffee reached out to me to tell me that another player spraggett wang had just gotten 24 lines himself and made the world record a three-way tie and it wasn't until right after i uploaded the video that i learned that another player kirby703 had also claimed to tie the record earlier that day just when i thought things couldn't get crazier a mere two hours after i uploaded my video i received this comment hi i'm a big fan of your channel i love all your tetris content i watched this video and then decided to try this out myself and um i think i might have broken the world record at 26 lines sure enough the four-way tie had been broken and surprisingly it had come from a completely unknown player she'd never played in any competitive matches had never posted anything on the tetris discords and didn't have any other tetris videos on her youtube channel so i reached out to find out more about this record-setting player so how did you originally get into nes tetris uh winner of 2018 i was studying for midterms took a break and then somehow i ended up watching hours of the ctwc finals from 2018. so it just came up in your recommended you clicked on a video and then got sucked in yep it was funny because i had a math final the day after and it was supposed to be just a 15-minute break but it definitely wasn't after that so how long have you been playing and what is your personal best i've been playing since maybe like early 2019. my current personal best is 584k on a level 18 start how long did it take you to get that 26 lines game honestly it wasn't that long i think i was trying it for like an hour or so kept getting like 10 15 lines after an hour i like i just got a really lucky seed and i looked at the line count and i was like whoa that looks like a world record so were there any particular strategies that you were kind of having in mind that you were using i remember it from your interview with the previous holder the avoiding three wide wells was definitely part of it but i also found that three wide two deep wells are nice since they can fit lj and t pieces the space they leave behind after you skim that line is not a bad shape for your stack but as it turns out the no rotation world records were just getting started the very next day zoltan another player known as known about responded to hannah's comment linking another 26 lines no rotation game and at the beginning of his game something pretty special happened to boot who perfect clearly yes yes yes over on the discord poet 13 a prominent player from germany had said that he also got 26 lines but that he wouldn't upload his game when i asked him why he responded it looks like somebody already got more incredibly in poet's video it appeared that he got his 26 lines game tying the world record and then in the very next game broke it with 27 lines ah demonstrating yeah new word hydra dude claimed in response that he would get 30 lines and various people chimed in with claims of their own but now the pressure was on who would be the first to break 30 lines a few hours later zoltan struck back again with a 27 lines video of his own three minutes later hydron dude uploaded a video of himself getting 27 lines with enough space at the top of his board to seemingly get more but ended up topping out and he had to settle for another world record tie the next day kirby 703 uploaded her own 27 lions game to bring the record up to a four-way tie again and amazingly she had also set a world record by getting 15 lines from a level 19 start i reached out to her to ask her about how she'd been able to do that what was it like going for that because level 19 is a pretty intense speed even for playing normally um well i'm pretty good at nes tetris you know a max out player but not like one of the best in the world so i'm familiar with level 19 speeds i've practiced dash and quick taps i can get things where they need to go until i hit a certain height i think the saying goes it took about 20 minutes i really did just put a few attempts at it i hit 15 lines tried it for like an hour later couldn't even crack 12. the other reason i had reached out to kirby was because of her accomplishments in more modern guideline versions of tetris in my previous gnoro video i had talked about how in guideline it's impossible to deal with garbage without rotating l's js and t pieces all spawn upside down in guideline if you're an nes player so they're flat on the bottom you can't fill a one wide garbage hole but in modes that don't have it surviving for an extended amount of time might be possible and kirby had demonstrated just that by completing an entire 40-line sprint that would be my claim to fame for no rotation um as far as i know i was the first to do it but then i found out raviklia did it too i don't think either of us knew about each other's runs but we both did a 40 line i think the strategy is just to be thinking as far ahead as you can so that you get a board that is likely to work with future bags but as it turns out kirby also had a far more ambitious goal in mind i'm working on proving that you can go forever that you can clear an infinite number of lines because with nes it's easy maybe you'll just get squares forever place five squares clear two lines repeat but guideline has seven bags so it's not trivial i find this kind of hilarious because the almost perfectly random piece generation in nes tetris normally plagues players in standard games because it can give you long droughts of important pieces but in this proof random piece generation is a boon because theoretically you could just get perfect luck for all the ideal pieces indefinitely for modern guideline versions seven bag guarantees that all the pieces will be given within sets of seven meaning that not only would kirby have to figure out how to accommodate every piece including the awkward ones she wouldn't have any chance of getting extra of the more helpful ones it's gonna be a tricky proof but i think it can be done i think what i'm gonna end up doing is i'm gonna find some like loop of 35 or maybe 70 pieces if there's some weird parody problem that obeys seven bag and perfect clears and the idea is theoretically you just get these 70 pieces repeating over and over and wouldn't you know it shortly after we recorded the interview kirby finished her proof publishing a 70 piece sequence that gives a perfect clear using 10 bags of all seven pieces this wouldn't necessarily be a guide that someone could follow since you'd still need to get the pieces in the right order within the bags but it does prove that theoretically it's possible but back to the race to 30 lines with four players in a dead heat anything seems possible so i figured i might as well throw my hat into the ring and started live streaming attempts to break the record myself but shortly after i started someone in chat alerted me to the news hey foster says 31 lines now did somebody get 31 lines iron dude says 31 lines world record congratulations hydrant dude hydrant dude had fulfilled his claim and didn't seem to want to ever play this mode again his retirement from no rotation seemed to settle things again but one player did not give up two days later zoltan bursts through again to set what will become the current world record at a staggering 35 lines as commenter martin jacob noted in the span of four days almost 46 percent had been added to the world record and zoltan went on to accomplish a ton more with no rotation including clearing b type 1-1 getting five lines on a 29 start and getting 20 lines or more 100 times so i reached out to zoltan to figure out more about how he'd done all this when did you decide to start grinding for the no rotation world records just after you you uploaded the video about the no rotations i was like okay it's only 24. i will give it a shot so on the really next day i i downloaded uh madison and and okay i will just you know try it out and on on my third try i actually set the record and i got 24 but i wasn't recording it so i was like okay now it's time to get an obs and start grinding it hit it when that happens trying to break a world record in something get it on the third try don't have a way to record it so just do it again no big deal so after all these attempts i was curious if zoltan had figured out any optimal strategies yes definitely there are lots of strategies that actually i i discovered and i'm actually using so first of all you have to fill both sides of your playing screen because if there are holes on the left side or there are holes on the right side you cannot feel them only with a j or an l the same goes if it's too wide you will need an s or z or a square and so on and so on so if they are filled there are so much piece combinations that can help you but on the sides there are only like one or two so that is really bad if you want to get high scores uh also i realized because it's really slow like on level one level two you can tuck everything like even three tacks or two attacks you can do it that's right counter intuitive but uh when you see it you will you will realize like think about uh stacking two else on the left if you do it you can tuck actually two times a j and there will be like a perfect chance to clear those lines also there is one more specific strategies with a t a j or an l you will create an awkward hole on the first line if it's like from the beginning like at the start and that line you have to like discard because if you actually try to clear that line it's just going to ruin everything you will get really dependent on lines squares and s's and z's so like every second line you should just discard it if you don't feel confident that you will get those pieces you've probably played uh this mode more than just about anybody what do you think is the feasible limit to how many lines someone could get on this mode i think i played around i don't know a thousand or maybe a thousand and five hundred games something like in between those numbers and i think 35 is is really challenging to beat i'm i'm trying it like a week from now and i only got a 31 in the in the last week so i don't think that 40 is going to be beaten really soon but i think 40 is possible so if you get really lucky with with the pieces and you you make correct decisions i'm pretty sure that you can get 40. so who will be the first to get 40 lines zoltan is giving it his best shot and you might be able to see him do it live i've already joined twitch i started to stream unfortunately my laptop isn't that good but i'm buying actually a new pc and i will make it in a much better quality so zoltan's twitch page will be in the description if you want to check it out whoever ends up holding the record in the future i'll be fascinated to see how it happens thanks again to kirby hannah and zolton for coming on for an interview and i'll see you guys next week [Music] you

Channel: aGameScout

Views: 372,290

Keywords: agamescout, nes tetris, classic tetris, agamescout tetris, classic tetris world championship, no piece rotation nes tetris, no piece rotation, no rotation, world record progression tetris, nes tetris world record progression

Id: yHqIdICC5wQ

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ParkBarrington360]

Isn’t that an official mode in some of the newer games?