How did you get into Tetris?

[cubixcreature]

I've been playing Tetris on the Gameboy for some 12 years of my life now, and Tetris Worlds on PS2. I started playing TF on Facebook a while back, and that is what got me hooked and now playing competitive tetris. I remember watching the 30 some second times and thinking they were all hacks, which of course some of them were. I quickly learned how capable I was to reach these times. I think my Fastest time back then was around 1:10 seconds.

[virulent]

i think this thread does exist already but i haven't been able to find it either..if anyone can we'll merge them k?

1 of my friends in jhs asked me to play tnet on a multiplayer server [0c3.net] n it was fun~ so i started playing w/o her n i ended up finding a better server [terranigma.org] n getting super addicted [playing specials] joined a team [asiandynasty] n after years n years of addiction..i am still here :s

[Enter]

Tetris on the Gameboy transparent one in the 90ties hehe i still have the game boy and tetris attack!
than i stopped!
went to hi games to solve some computer cubes but i didn't like it e specially the LL part because i know all the algorithms in my hands
so than i saw tesallate and started to play.
that's it! now I'm here trolling  

[Maii04]

I thought one day, I'm bored what to play. Then I remembered there was something called Tetris. I googled Tetris and I got tetrisfriends. I first played marathon every once in a while. Then the next year I decided I wanted to save my score and signed up. Then by accidentally pressing arena, I started playing live Tetris. Then I got introduced to HD and started other Tetris variants. I am now a BB/TOJ player for the most part.

[Johnny147]

I first played Tetris on the NES and I liked it from there, but didn't really play much until I bought TDS when I bought my DS lite.  I played a lot of the online vs on there for a few years on and off.  October 2009 I decided to see if there were any PC Tetris games that were competitive like TDS and see how I stacked up.  I found TF and from there found HD.

[Radiance]

blockles in 2008. i thought i was pretty good at gameboy tetris and random flash tetris games, so i searched up "online multiplayer tetris".

i went by a lot of names on blockles, the biggest ones being Quicksand and Reveillark. the community of strong (at the time), and dedicated players kept me reaching for higher goals. i eventually found tetrisconcept and blockbox, and the rest is history.

[Boingloing]

Magical Tetris Challenge is my first tetris game, but I started playing a lot when I got TDS and started battling my brother a lot. Then I started playing online and got my rating to about 7000, stopped, started again and got owned, looked up a tetris community, found HD and PC games, got tired of the community, and stopped. People at school that I don't even talk to now know of my TF sprint record(39 seconds) because TF got popular in our school. lol.

[caffeine]

This is something I've been meaning to do for a long time, so today I finally sat down and tried to remember as much as possible.

The first time I ever played Tetris was in 1990 at the ripe age of four years old. My parents took me along to a get-together at their friends house. Their friend's son, who was older than me, showed me his NES. He had Tetris and Dr. Mario. He mentioned that Dr. Mario had just came out, so that's what we played at first. Then he put in Tetris, and I fell in love at first sight. It was all I wanted to do for the rest of the night, and I believe I threw a tantrum when they said it was time to go.

Between 1990 and 1998 is very foggy, but I remember a couple of things here and there. In 1993, we visited my uncle's house, and my cousin showed my sister their new personal computer. On it... Microsoft Tetris. It was glorious, and I anxiously awaited my turn to play. Unfortunately for seven year old me, my evil older sister and cousin wouldn't let me have a turn. After leaving for home not having had my chance to play, Tetris was all I could think about. It was all I wanted to do.

Two years later, that burning desire to play Tetris re-awoken within me. My friend's family took me on a trip to the beach. I sat in a four hour drive with nothing else to do than watch my friend play on his Game Boy. The game looked so fun! Did I get a chance to play? NO!!! Once again, I was tempted beyond what any kid could be expected to handle, and I was denied. I believe this, along with what happened at my cousin's house, to have planted a seed deep within my psyche. Had I been able to play and had satisfied my curiosity, I don't think I would be the Tetris-obsessed zombie I am today. But since I could only watch and not play, I became totally enchanted by the game.

Some time after that, I got to play an arcade version that I randomly found in a bowling alley! I don't remember any details, though.

In 1998, shortly after Ocarina of Time came out, I started going over to a friend's house, and I finally got to play not only NES Tetris, but also Microsoft Tetris. His mom had the top score, which said something like "I love you, kids!", but I eventually beat it.

It must've been around 1998-1999 when we got the internet at my house. I was around twelve years old. One of the first things I did was download every Tetris game I could find. One of them being Tetrinet, which I dismissed as "stupid" because it had the gimmicky special attacks. I remember also downloading "Kid's Tetris" on download.com.

In 1999, I also got a GBC right when Pokemon Yellow came out. I quickly picked up Game Boy Tetris. I remember that my sister's boyfriend and I would see who could get the high score. We shared great frustration while watching my sister play, who absolutely refused to soft drop. I played this game for hours upon hours. My favorite thing to do was to test myself by playing B-type on heart levels.

In 2000 onward, I played a crap-load of Shockwave Tetris. It had a sweet sound track, a TTC seal of approval, and best of all... an online leaderboard. Man I used to love that game. I'd come home and see what the daily top scores were. I became intensely addicted, trying to reach higher and higher levels. I even emailed some of the top leaders to ask them about their strategies. Only one ever replied back. This was the first time I remember analyzing the scoring and gameplay. I remember posting on shockwave.com about how the pieces weren't centered properly when they spawned (I believe they spawned two columns away from the wall).

Shortly after, I started playing Tetrinet more regularly. It was around this time that I found the "Nintendo Mini Series" Tetris keychain at the Louvre on a trip to Paris. I spent the rest of the trip playing it. I remember buying The Next Tetris" for PC some time after this. Unfortunately, the online leaderboard feature was defunct before I got around to buying it. Still, very fun.

This would be around the time I began to endlessly search altavista.com for Tetris-related websites. The best by far was tetrislovers.tripod.com! It had scoreboards for two of my favorite games: Tetris DX and The New Tetris. It even had strategy articles! I closely followed the rivalry between the two top players on the TNT board: gilly and this other guy. I would go on to honing my skill in both games, but The New Tetris was especially interesting. I used to play my sister in the versus mode. She quit playing me when I figured out how to exploit T-Spins (no, they didn't send garbage: they'd cause an "avalanche." So, if you stacked up real messy and high up to the top, an avalanche would enable you to clear like ten lines at once).

Once Tetrinet 2 came out, I was totally hooked. I played every day after school religiously. I was absolutely astounded by the speed and skill of the players I saw. It blew me away. I became a speed junky.

In 2003, I learned that an multiplayer online version of Tetris came out on Xbox. I saved up and bought an Xbox as soon as I could. I was a couple months late into the game, but I quickly dominated, as I was already very familiar with PC Tetris Worlds (which I had bought right after it came out for PC in 2001). The competition on Worlds Live wasn't nearly as good as Tetrinet 2, and it wasn't as fast either, but I stuck to it since it was an "authentic" Tetris game. I also really enjoyed the voice chat feature. I got a big ego-stroke out of beating everyone all the time, and I met a bunch of friends in the process. Some of them, like passnot, still play regularly (now on Tetris Splash, I believe). Passnot, Jays lil sister, and I would play every night and have some really funny conversations. This would be the first game where I seriously started analyzing multiplayer strategy. I played this for at least a couple of years.

Around here, I first learned about TGM. I probably would've became more interested, but it just wasn't as fast as Tnet2. From 2003 onward, I'd play many various mobile Tetris games. I saw a couple HELLFIRE members on those leaderboards, too.

In 2005, after being fed up with not having any good Tetris websites out there, I started tetrisconcept. The userbase slowly built up, and in 2006, when Tetris DS came out, it started to get really popular. Tepples made Lockjaw, and I'd say it was the first "modern" clone. It was a really amazing (and fast) game. I played a butt-load of Tetris DS, and I even ran into Mihara (TGM creator). I beat him at first, but eventually he got a rematch and whooped me pretty bad. Later on, Tetris Mobile from EA hosted an online tournament, which I won. I got a trip for two to Hawaii and $2000. There, I met up with two TC members, and we visited BPS. They had an awesome Tetris collection on display. I learned that TTC people weren't evil at all. They're actually pretty nice in person.

After four years in the website game, I closed up tetrisconcept. I was very proud of it and its role in facilitating Tetris knowledge to the masses. However, a few disgruntled members, who weren't happy settling for an archived version, took it upon themselves to steal its content and make a copycat site under a slightly different domain name. I still don't understand why they couldn't have started their own unique site.

I joined harddrop.com in 2009 and have been playing these more recent games ever since. Man, good times. Here's to many years of Tetris ahead!

[ryan_heise]

In December 2006, some random guy by the name of "caffeine" emailed me, out of the blue, to compliment me on my Rubik's Cube simulator. He liked the idea of watching replays of highscores (which was a fairly new idea for web games at the time), pointed me to a video of a high speed Tetris clone called Lockjaw, and said "I wish someone would make something this polished for speed Tetris".

Having seen the famous Tetris Japan finals video a few years earlier, my intrigue was reignited, and after considering the various legal implications, I decided to go ahead and build Tessellate.

While building Tessellate, I ran into a problem. The moment the game started to become even remotely playable, I became too easily distracted and found myself playing the game rather than doing any development on it!! As a result, it took me about 6 whole months to finish the game, but by the end of it, I had become a fairly decent player, and a new interest was born. The end :-)

[jkwon23]

1 year and 10 months

[Ravendarksky]

2.?? years

[Paul676]

Properly addicted, now for 2 years 9 months

[shahil]

I started tetris on April 1st 2009, LOL

i was banned for 6 months and then another 2 months so - 8 months to that

[DAS44]

About a year and eight months.

Or if anyone else asks, 2 weeks.

[ZeroT]

About a year and eight months.

Or if anyone else asks, 2 weeks.