Interrogating why I became a Tetris Grandmaster
Rose Peck
2025-05-26
Memes from the Tetris: The Grandmaster community. If you want to improve, all you have to do is stack cleaner and faster.
I gave a talk at RustWeek recently, and during my speaker intro, the emcee mentioned that I'm a Grandmaster Tetris player. This is true1, and it's my default fun-fact whenever people like conference organizers want to know interesting bullet points about me for emcees to read.
The first question I always get when I mention this fact is:
"How does one become a Grandmaster Tetris player? What does that even mean?"
This is a great question, but it's not really what I want to talk about today. For those curious, I've added an appendix with an explanation, but reading it isn't actually necessary to understand this post. Suffice to say that becoming a Tetris Grandmaster is pretty hard to do, and, as a result of this achievement, I would consider myself to be Pretty Good At TetrisTM.
Regardless, later that week, I was hanging out with my good friend and coworker, Miles Silberling-Cook. Miles asked me a much more interesting question:
"Why? What drove you to become a Grandmaster in Tetris?"2
And I've been thinking about it.
I think a lot of people assume that the top players in the world are driven by a competitive spirit. That they want to be The BestTM, and get satisfaction from honing their skills to be at the top of the leaderboards. I'm sure this is true for lots of folks, but it's never been the driving factor for me.
Fundamentally, the amount of time I want to sink into a game is completely uncorrelated to how long that game is. In general, I'll play through a game until I don't want to keep playing anymore, but that can happen at a variety of points in the game's content curve:
But some games. Some games get their hooks so deep, it is like a curse.3 What do you do when you've done every bonus level, found every collectible, beaten every challenge... What do you do when the game has run out of content to give you, but you can't leave?
When you've already done everything there is to do within the designed space of the game (or simply aren't interested in what remains in that space), it's time to peek behind the curtain and start playing outside the designed area.
When I say the designed space, I'm talking about the parts of the game and game content that is intentionally authored by the game's creators. This includes (but is not limited to) the intended wrote rules that govern the game's systems, the layout of levels, the achievements and goals that are tracked by the in-game progress tracker, and so on. These are the things that the designers have given you to play with. But there is more game that exists outside this space.
Things like unintended interactions between systems, the game's meta, bugs, glitches, speedrunning tech, user-defined challenges like the secret grade, and so on. It's all the things that we see and find and do when we start peeking through the cracks, and, especially, when we start splitting those cracks open. And, out here, you must make your own structure.
Many others have encountered this space, and many others absolutely adore playing in it. I am not the first, I will not be the last, and people have come up with a great variety of structures for themselves:
And yes, going for Grandmaster ranks that are so crushingly difficult, few will ever achieve them. Technically speaking, the GM grade is still within the designed space of the TGM series (there is an in-game rank for it after all), but it's so far beyond the normal experience of playing Tetris games that, to me, it feels similar to the things I listed above. Your average Player Of Tetris GamesTM isn't going to pick up a TGM game and start the grind.
So, to make many words into few, I did it because it was there. I did it because I could. I did it because, no matter how good you are, you can always try to stack a little bit cleaner, and a little bit faster. I did it because Tetris fits the shape of my brain just right, so much so that I feel like the pieces are inside me. I did it because after over 10 years of stacking tetrominoes, I'm still looking for more to do with the 7 multicolored pieces that shift beneath my skin.
But why?
Eh?
Why Tetris? Why did this game hold your interest for so long?
Oddly enough, I don't actually have a very good answer to this question.
Why does anyone like the things they like? Is it even knowable? I think the one thing I can say is that Tetris is a game that relies heavily on visual processing, and I do have some natural ability in that area. I take satisfaction in making things fit together5, and I have an easier time seeing piece placements than the average untrained eye.
I always found Tetris to be a satisfying and relaxing stim, and it still leaves the language and audio parts of my brain free to do whatever else. I've often used it as a kind of fidget toy while listening to things, if you can believe it. It's been a constant companion while listening to podcasts, watching videos, waiting for code to compile, relaxing on a Saturday night, and chatting about Tetris theory with other block-stacking masochists.
I'm sure someday I'll tire of it, but until then...
I have no mouth. And I must stack cleaner and faster.
The short answer is that I play a series of brutally difficult, single-player Tetris games called Tetris: The Grandmaster. In these games, you are assigned a rank based on how well you play, with Grandmaster (GM) being the highest possible rank.6 I have achieved the GM rank in one of the games (specifically TGM 1), so I am a Grandmaster. The exact grading criteria varies from game to game, but in general, the games focus on playing precisely, with very few mistakes, at blistering speeds. You can see an example of high-level TGM play here.
Read on for the longer answer.
For those familiar with Guideline (aka modern Tetris), the TGM games are a lot more restrictive with piece movement (including sections with instant gravity, or 20G), put a greater emphasis clearing tetrises (clearing 4 lines at once using the I piece), and require that certain sections be finished within certain time limits. They are crushingly difficult, with multiple mechanics that are intended to mess with the player's head, or force you to play in newer and more challenging ways. Playing with pieces that turn invisible after being placed, for example, is a classic TGM mechanic.
It is worth saying explicitly: unlike Grandmaster titles that you might be familiar with from competitive games, TGM ranks are not based on the current top players, but are instead single player achievements. Once you have achieved the Grandmaster rank, you are a Grandmaster. Ranks are never removed, except in cases of cheating.
There are four games in the series, which get harder as they go:
You'll notice that the grade section says "GM", which indicates a Grandmaster. You can check out my profile on that site for my other Tetris achievements, which I try to keep up-to-date. ↩
Paraphrased. ↩
As with my feelings on floating point, I say this full of admiration. I don't resent this fact, or the games that do it to me. I love them. I love them so much it almost hurts. ↩
At this point, I'll note that Tetris was not the first game to grab me like this. I was a Super Metroid speedrunner once upon a time. ↩
Yes, I do pack the car for the family road trips. And yes, I am good at it. ↩
Some of the later games make a distinction between "green line" and "orange line" GM ranks, with orange line being harder, usually requiring extra line clears or speeds in certain places. ↩
Estimates vary wildly here. The first three games were only available in arcades, so there is an unknown number of players who got GM at a random arcade 20 years ago, and never wrote it down on any leaderboard. ↩
Again, estimates vary. ↩
