“This time, there had to be a different ending.”

It is a testament to how much things have changed in competitive NES Tetris – a game released the same month the Berlin Wall fell – that this hour-long documentary by Summoning Salt that talks about the 2018 Tetris Championship covers the previous revolution in a play technique:

I don’t watch a lot of sports, but I think this is a sport movie: a battle between the classic DAS players – DAS stands for Delayed Auto Shift and means that the player just holds the left or right pad and have the piece slide on its own – and the new-at-the-time technique of hypertapping, which allowed to move the piece to the side faster, but was really demanding on the player’s hands.

It’s gripping at times – wait until the moment when a DAS player runs with a dangerous move called “quick tap” – but also surprisingly touching at the very end.

(If you are interested, the newer playing technique that was invented in the 2020s, and even more effective than hypertapping, is rolling.)