The History of Tetris World Records

Music Credits:

List of all music in this video:

Video Credits:

[SummoningSalt]

Watch the chase for the rebirth live!

And thanks to the following people for help with research! Check out their channels:

[Obscuros]

you know its epic when the game gets maxed out by a legendary player and you are only 11 minutes into a 2 hour video.

[bessie]

After Jonas Neubauer’s death in 2021, the Tetris World Championship trophy was renamed and redesigned in his honor. The quote from Jonas on it reads: “If you’re a high visibility player, it’s on you to move the community in a positive direction”
RIP Jonas

[thecountbassy_]

Fractal’s heart-wrenching yelp of dismay when Scuti, his biggest competitor, narrowly missed the crash, and utter glee and pride when he got it at the last moment is the most wholesome and wonderful thing I’ve ever seen in a world record community. True sportsmanship, honor, and selflessness at the highest level.

[zephyrvezir]

Summoning Salt videos be like:
"He did something, nobody could have imagined as possible"
-> still 1, 5h left in the video

[bluescuti]

Thanks so much for making this video. I have been watching your videos even before I started playing Tetris, and being in one of your videos is really cool to me and I've always wanted to be in one.

[mcdonalds]

Blue Scuti had lost his father to a heart attack just a week before he defeated Tetris. He dedicated the achievement to him. What an absolute legend.

[tommyguerrera]

And Blue Scuti just beat the record yesterday (5/23/2024) starting at level 29, going to level 239, with a final score of over 18 million!

[billyrobison]

"This, is how far Eric ended up making it" was actually sick

[_Old]

That shot of slowly scrolling to the right from level 66 to 146 was SO dramatic and had the PERFECT effect of suspense and blowing my mind at the conclusion. Well done!

[aGameScout]

Thanks so much for covering NES Tetris! Perfect timing with this video, given how we're somehow in the middle of possibly the craziest year in the game's 35 year history.

[gardah]

I didn't know Jonas Neubauer was also one of the early ones to hit a verified maxout, and boy did I tear up even just seeing "Jonas" show up at 9:00.

RIP champ.

[brograb]

I love this community because there’s always a “There was no way anyone thought that they could improve on that”—one hour left of the video.

[fumoffu_l]

I still absolutely love Fractal's sportsmanship. He's watching someone else make history the way he wanted to, and is smiling and cheering the whole time.
He truly cares more about the game being pushed to its limits more than he cares about being the one to do it.

[CVizzle]

"In level 187 after 4 rebirths, It was discovered that Tetris spontaneously turns into the Soda Popinski fight from Mike Tyson's Punch Out. Naturally, the first person to clear this hurdle was none other than Matt Turk himself."

[thanotosomega]

I love that Salt is such a class act, never making categories seem like they don't matter when he explains the one that the big focus, doesn't name cheaters so they won't get harassed over it, but will never hesitate to be savage about video quality.

[gooblop]

For many world records, what determines the jumps in record times tends to be players finding a trick or glitch or exploit and then integrating that in their runs to play less of the intended game. For Tetris it's the opposite, the game has things trying to stop you both intentionally and as glitches, and the world record's history is about people overcoming those barriers through sheer skill to play even more than was ever intended. That is what makes this story truly amazing, and I'm glad this video covers it so well.

[potroast]

RIP Jonas Neubauer. He was an amazing face for the competitive Tetris scene and was the person who got a lot of us into the Tetris community

[theleftuprightatsoldierfield]

Here are some things that Salt didn’t mention in the video:

A right well is almost universally preferred by players because long bars spin with a bias towards the right. When you rotate a long bar at the top of the screen, it moves into column 6 instead of column 5. This means you only need to move it 4 columns to get it to the right edge of the board while you need to move it 5 columns to get it to the left edge. That extra column is crippling on higher speeds.

Every top level player plays on a CRT TV screen. Modern TVs have too much latency, which makes gameplay significantly harder, especially now that piece movement is so fast and precise. However, the lower latency comes at the cost of visibility. CRTs do not display dark colors very well, which is why dusk, charcoal, and are all so hard to see.

The 810 line level is not always level 235. It changes depending on what level you start at. This is due to a glitch that has been known about for about as long as the game has been out. The number of lines before transition is supposed to increase by 10 per starting level. However, due to a bug, levels 9-15 all only take 100 lines to transition. This means that if you start on one of these levels, you will have cleared a different amount of lines by the time the game starts to break, which then changes the 810 line level. This might be the key to getting rebirth as the other color schemes are much easier to see.

Part of the reason that Tetris Gym was so widely used and accepted is that the only modifications it made were to the score and level counter. Since the game crash wasn’t understood until very recently, no one knew that this mod had unintentionally patched it. Other than this unintentional patch, gameplay was identical to the original cartridge

[futuramarox]

RIP Jonas Neubauer. Loved watching the incredible fight of Jonas vs Joseph live, was one of the greatest feelings of my life, and an incredible display of sportsmanship between both players. Thanks for making this dude