I’m a straight-A student and maths is my favourite subject, so gaming taps into the way my mind works. After that, Andy and I began to play competitively we’d shout our scores at each other from our bedrooms. The seven-time world champion had been dethroned by a 16-year-old, and lots of younger people were watching for the first time. The championship began in 2010, but things stepped up a gear in 2018. We re-watched the whole thing over two days on our living room TV. There were commentators hyping up the online audience, which added to the excitement. Their speed and skill at making decisions was genius. The competitors use classic 80s Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) consoles, and whoever gets the highest score wins. But when I came across a YouTube video of the Classic Tetris world championship, in 2018, I was amazed. The game is so universally popular that over the decades, it has migrated from the Game Boy to PlayStation, Xbox, iPhone and everything in between. Once the screen fills with shapes, you lose. If uncompleted, they stay on screen and shapes pile up on top. Tetris is a simple concept: you rotate and align descending shapes to complete horizontal rows, which then drop down and disappear. My older brother Andy and I played it in our home in Texas. I was eight when I found his Nintendo Game Boy and discovered Tetris.
PINK TETRIS SCREEN NES FULL
T here’s a shelf in my dad’s closet, full of old video games and consoles dating back to the 1970s.