I fell in love with video games as early as preschool. As with most children my age, my family had a computer in the study, a Dell tower that had graduated from Windows 98 to XP sometime in 2004. I don't remember how old I was when my mother and father started letting me use it unsupervised, but by as early as preschool I was regularly surfing the web and playing Flash games alongside my brother. I was an angel, never went anywhere or did anything or talked to anyone I wasn't supposed to. In the third grade, I got a GameCube for Christmas, which would have been about nine years old by that point (but who's counting), and I bounced back and forth between the two for a long time. A few years later, I would start to emulate classic games, downloading ROMs by the bunch when they were plastered all over the internet. I can still remember sitting next to my brother, playing Ninja Gaiden on some sort of NES emulator wrapped in a Chrome extension? as my first time emulating a game. I don't even think I understood what a ROM was or that what I was doing was illegal. I can still remember how shocked I was the day I figured that out lol.

I've always been a bit of a competitive gamer, not in the sense of online multiplayer games, or in raging or throwing controllers, but in the sense that I want to learn the game, understand the game, be good at it, and win. The NES has a lot of plain brutal, unforgiving titles, that demand a great level of trial and error and mechanical prowess, with deaths usually sending you back to the beginning of a nigh-impossible section, or perhaps the beginning of the game. You got good, or you died. A lot. But that made winning all the more satisfying. It was a Sunday morning when I beat Battletoads, and my mom had made pancakes. Would I have remembered that if the game was easy? Probably not. For me, the challenge, the unfairness, is a lot of what makes these games entertaining, and I still have many childhood memories of me or my brother finishing an exhausting game or doing some crazy challenge, or in the case of Zelda II, making any progress at all. It was a few years later my dad would get us an actual NES, bidding $50 for it and a lot of tens of games on eBay at the last second. It would see a lot of use, then got tucked away in the closet as I got older, along with most of my other things.

I'm not sure what exactly it was, but something made me dig it out in my senior year of high school. I think I was going to some after school event, and I wanted something to do with my friends. I had assembled an all-star lineup, the classic Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt (still haven't met anyone with just SMB in isolation), Punch-Out!!, Battletoads, Mega Man 3, Metroid, and Tetris. We played a little bit of everything, I went home, but instead of putting it back in the closet, I kept the NES out. I played a little bit of Tetris, it was alright. Very clunky, old tetris, but it was Tetris. Well, my mom sees me playing, and she wants a try.

My mom was better than me at Tetris.

My mom barely knew how to use a computer. She never played any games - the occasional Monkey Ball, and she would get motion sickness about twenty minutes in. She did sudokus in the paper. She didn't have a phone. She was old. And yet she was better than me at Tetris. How could that be? So I started playing. Every day in computer class at school, I would get a half hour in. I would get my friends to play with me on the now defunct-Tetris Friends. I would watch videos, I would learn, I had fun. The pieces started to fall into place (haha). I got fast, then I got decent at stacking, then I got faster, then I learned some techniques, then I got faster still. I never ended up going back to NES, or "Classic" Tetris, though I now have a great deal of respect for it. I played for a year, I had a lot of fun, I got not half bad. Then I went off to college, and it was time to move on. Or so I thought.

Round One Corporation is a Japanese arcade chain that began expanding to the United States around 2010. In 2021, my sophomore year of college, they opened a location fifteen minutes down the road from my dorm. I went from trying the games there with an idle curosity to showing up weekly with a good friend of mine, each time trying harder and harder to beat my old scores. Around this same time I became enamored with arcade classic Ms. Pac-Man, which I had played in my childhood, but this time with a renewed vigor. I spent nearly a year obsessively researching and practicing strategies which culiminated in a two-hour long, 540,080 point game, part of which was performed in my programming languages class. Anyways, my Round1, for a reason I'm still not sure of, possesses an original Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 Plus (commonly known as TAP), an arcade game from the year 2000.

The Tetris The Grand Master (TGM) series is the brainchild of Ichiro Mihara, vice president of game development studio Arika. Mihara saw a need for a challenging Tetris game with a lot of depth, for players that could max out the popular Sega Tetris from ten years prior with their eyes closed. The "problem" with many Tetris games is that they eventually become impossible to control for even the most skilled players, with the pieces falling so quickly that even with perfect reactions and execution, the pieces simply cannot be moved fast enough. This is referred to as a "kill-screen", and it's a common part of many arcade games across all genres. The creators of Sega Tetris were smart and had devised a system where, though a piece might come in contact with the top of the stack, it could still be moved and rotated for a small amount of time - a mechanic called the "lock delay". Mihara borrowed this idea and expanded upon it, making it the hallmark mechanic of the TGM series. As you place pieces and clear lines, you advance further and further into the game, divided into ten sections of 100 pieces placed and lines cleared. At section 5, or level 500, the gravity becomes infinite, with pieces simply appearing at the top of the stack and being unable to "climb" any higher. At this point in the game, you must play the next 500 levels only surviving from the lock delay, with just a quarter-second to move and rotate each piece before it's stuck forever (though, the timer does reset whenever a piece moves down a row). It's a grueling challenge and requires almost a complete relearning of how you build your stack and what moves you are allowed to make. The pool of legal piece placements becomes extremely limited by the restrictions placed upon you and it becomes very hard to maintain a clean stack. Reach level 1000, and you're done. You are given a grade based on your score, and if you meet some score and time requirements, you're given the rank of Grandmaster. TGM is unique among Tetris games in that there is a finite beginning and end, and you are not judged by how long you can play for, but rather the opposite. Given a timeframe of on average, ten to fifteen minutes, and a daunting challenge, how well can you play, and how quickly can you play well? It doesn't suddenly decide time is up and kill you, nor does it let you play forever. You are given a challenge, the tools to beat it, and the entire game is designed with this vision in mind.

I was familiar with the TGM series from my dabbling in Tetris some years prior, and I found the original TGM from 1998 to be a dated and frustrating game, similarly to NES Tetris. You get to see one piece ahead, you can't hold, your pieces don't climb like in SRS, and most importantly, the I piece (the line) can't rotate when it's flat against the stack, forcing you to accomodate it lest you find yourself with a brick covering your precious well opening. The randomizer is actually pretty fair (but even pseudo randomness is still occasionally cruel), but I wasn't a fan. Without giving it much thought, I played TAP for a bit, I sucked, it didn't really scratch an itch. But the seed was planted. From my time at Round1, and with my father being a jukebox repair person, I have come to take quite an interest in arcade machines. I own three cabinets, I have two more game boards outside of that, and I'm working on putting together a controller and a makeshift cabinet right now. I fix the ones I can and every so often head up to an auction in the Southeast to scout for games. In about July of last year, a clip of an unlucky TGM fail on a huge charity stream went around my arcade circles, and it got my gears turning. Just how hard could TGM really be? Those same mechanics I saw as clunky a few years ago for some reason now felt like a refreshing challenge. At the risk of sounding elitist, Tetris games since 2006's Tetris DS have started to abandon all pretense of difficulty, with just about any rotation, climb, and stalling technique allowed. There's not even a need to learn two rotate keys. So I started on my journey.

Tetris: The Grandmaster might just be the second-best Tetris game ever made. It is impossible to talk about TGM without mentioning how meticulously it's designed - every aspect of the game has been tailor-made to suit the needs of the player, whether they realize it or not. Pieces have bright, contrasting colors, which slowly darken as the piece gets closer to locking. The active piece clearly stands out among the rest, and the top of the stack is given a solid white border to further this goal. Every piece has a unique sound for when it appears in the "NEXT" queue, as well as a sound cue for when its lock delay starts to kick in or resets. In the time between a piece locking and the next piece spawning, the player may hold the rotate key to cause the next piece to spawn in already rotated - not only is this mandatory for high-level play, but there is also a metallic swooshing sound when this buffer is done successfully. There are sound effects for going up a grade and advancing to the next 100-level section, with each section having its own background image. Like most arcade games of the era, the sound design is just plain good, and the game is nice on the ears.

Quick sidenote - I'm of the opinion that sound design is more critical to the "feel" of a game than most people realize. Compare, if you will, the songs that play during TGM and TAP's credits sequences. TGM ends the frame you reach level 1000, you are awarded the rank of Grandmaster should you have earned it, and the credits rolling is a lighthearted, celebratory moment, with the theme aptly named "Happy Happy". Gameplay continues, but purely cosmetically, with no penalty for death and no extra points to be earned. TAP revamps this, turning the staff roll into a stressful challenge and forcing you to play at infinite gravity, high speed, and turning your pieces invisible the instant they lock, only awarding you Grandmaster rank if you manage to survive a full minute. It's accompanied by a fittingly menacing theme that is in incredibly stark contrast to the happy music from the game before it. The TGM series absolutely knocks this aspect out of the park.

There is also a noticably large timer at the bottom of the screen, directly under your playfield, and while there is no penalty for playing slowly, you are encouraged to play as fast as you can, with faster players breaking ties on the leaderboard and the Grandmaster grade only being given to players with a total time of less than thirteen and a half minutes. (My first GM time was 13:29.78). The game eases you in, taking away your ghost piece indicator at level 100, giving you a taste of higher gravity, then lowering it, then raising it again at a much sharper rate. Reaching level 500 is an accomplishment in itself, and it's only then that the "real" game begins, as the gravity becomes infinitely strong and stays that way until you reach level 1000 or die trying. And I died. A lot. Occasionally I would get screwed by some particularly poor piece sequences, but one of the most intoxicating things about the game is that it was almost always my own fault. Yes, I just died at 760 for the fifth time today, but the next run I could lock in and just win the whole game on the spot. Whoops, I messed up the rotation on the I piece again. If I just don't do that next time....

I've heard the TGM series described as many things, but I think the most accurate came from Mihara himself - "Tetris that makes you better at Tetris". TGM doesn't just guide you to being a better Tetris player, it assumes you are one, and forces you to keep up. I'm all for accessability in gaming, and I'm glad we have come far from the incredibly obtuse and punishing titles that were commonplace in the 80s - but while I recognize TGM isn't for everyone, or even most people, I am so grateful for the Arika team's vision and commitment to making a fair yet true challenge that excels in several aspects. I'd spend hours a day playing the game, and it was like I was right back in Quick Man's stage in Mega Man 2, dying over and over, every tenth or so attempt getting slightly farther than the others before I was back to floundering around at the start. But after a few short months (4 or 5), I was Grandmaster, and I could move on to the next game, which asks you to play better, faster, and more consistently. I just recently reached level 1000 with a rank of S9, the highest rank achieveable through "good" play. But good isn't good enough. I need to be both good and very fast to be Master, and then I need to survive the aforementioned credits sequence to be a Grandmaster. So the journey continues. Completely coincidentally, TGM4 is releasing in about a month after more than ten years of licensing issues. I'd recommend giving it a try. In the meantime, I'll be taking a break to start on Sir-tech's Wizardry, which I've heard is a grueling experience. I'll write about that if I don't end up giving up halfway through XD.