I was disappointed to find out Tetris Online, Inc had ceased all operations just a few months before – Tetris Friends had been permanently shuttered. In October of 2019, in the mood for a PC version of Tetris, I wondered what had happened to Tetris Friends. I’m sure in the interim I’ve played a game here and there on my venerable old Gameboy Advance, but I’ve discovered that, like a lot of games, I really prefer playing Tetris with a computer keyboard. Tetris Friends’ successor, Tetris Battle, never really managed to hold my attention, and when Tetris Friends was removed from Facebook in 2012 I stopped playing. I do remember on the global leaderboards, though, I was in the top 1% – probably because players any more serious than me were busy with Lockjaw and later NullpoMino, although I didn’t know anything about those at the time. I wish I’d thought to screencap my records back then – I think my very best time was 0:58 – but I foolishly assumed Tetris Friends would be around forever. I do my best to be a gracious winner, but in a few weeks’ time I was down to doing 40 line sprints in about 1:15 (at the turn of the century that would’ve been a world-record time, but by 2009 your world-class players were down to 25-30 seconds with custom clients) and once the novelty of watching my replays wore off (a friend once came over and asked me to play a game in person, so they could watch my hands – I felt a little bit flattered and a little bit like a sideshow attraction), it understandably made me an unappealing opponent. In what seemed like a fairly short period of time, I hit that point where, like the tragic man too good at fighting game to enjoy playing against friends but not good enough to play competitively, everyone I knew refused to play with me anymore. As various consoles and cartridges came and went I’ve had a lot of incarnations of Tetris, and then several years ago, when Facebook was a mecca of bullshitty browser-based micro-transactional time-gated friend-harassing casual games, I found Tetris Online, Inc’s Tetris Friends. I wonder sometimes if I initially took it up out of spite in response. I have a distinct memory of being roughly five years old, my older cousins playing Tetris on an NES, and refusing to let me join because I was “too young”. I’ve always enjoyed Tetris, and over the years across various platforms I’ve gotten fairly respectable at it.
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