Best of Five
Behind the scenes of the Classic Tetris World Championship
by Ian Koss
There is a surprising proliferation of documentaries on the subject out there, but Best of Five, put together by Chris Higgins and scored by Carl King, brings a unique blend of insight, humor, and deeply behind-the-scenes expertise to the world of competitive Tetris. In June, Higgins received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Classic Tetris World Championship in Pasadena, only the fourth such honor ever given in the event’s history. “There’s something scary about that,” he jokes. “Uh-oh, have I been working long enough that it’s been a whole lifetime?” Apparently yes.
Chris Higgins didn’t start out as a Tetris expert. In 2012, when the Classic Tetris World Championship (CTWC) moved from California to Portland, Oregon, his friend Adam Cornelius invited him to volunteer as a referee. Higgins protested that he didn’t know anything about Tetris — much less enough to officiate a world championship — but Cornelius assured him, “We’ll show you.” By 2015, he was Head Referee, often sitting onstage during the biggest matches, ensuring fair play and handling the quirks of decades-old Nintendo hardware. In 2016, he shifted to the camera crew, eventually leading a team that juggles more than 20 cameras and eight live Nintendo video feeds to produce the tournament’s livestream. Along the way, he’s seen it all, from online competitions during the pandemic to CRT TVs dying mid-match, and has become familiar to the vast network of volunteers that makes CTWC possible.
Carl King, meanwhile, came to the project through music. A composer and multi-instrumentalist, King’s score for Best of Five blends rock, classical nods, and subtle variations of the game’s iconic theme to create a musical language that matches the game’s intensity and charm. Together, they offer a detailed look at why Tetris continues to captivate players and spectators alike, the challenges of keeping retro hardware alive, and what it takes to turn a falling-block puzzle game into a global spectator sport.
• •
What is it about Tetris that makes it such a compelling spectator sport for some?
Chris: Tetris is LEGIBLE. What I mean by that is even if you’ve never played the game, you can look at it and figure out how it works.
This is very different from other modern eSports games in which the action is too fast or complex for an outsider to understand. In Tetris, you have a simple grid in which blocks fall and are slotted into place. It’s simple enough on the surface that new viewers can immediately feel as though they’re inside the heads of the competitors. Beyond that, watching Tetris is SATISFYING. When it’s played well, it’s very organized. When things go wrong, it’s chaotic and messy — but our players are so good that it feels great to see them slotting pieces so efficiently.
Over the years attending Tetris tournaments, I’ve seen a pattern: new folks wander by and look at the projection screen showing the games. Then they become mesmerized, getting into the groove. It really feels like you, as a viewer, are making the decisions along with the player. Many wander in and end up watching the entire tournament simply because the gameplay is so engrossing.
Carl: In my experience, it’s not just the competitive aspect. Even watching single-player Tetris is like watching pressure-washing videos. There’s a gratifying sense of peace in seeing the chaos go away. The game wasn’t originally designed to be multiplayer, so that was never a factor in it catching on. It keeps evolving over the decades — with the championship, small technological tweaks, and now “meta” controller techniques. But the core activity is simply making blocks fit together, like organizing your bookshelf or packing your whole band into the car. Drummer Mike Stone and I regularly use the phrases “doing some garage Tetris” and “doing some life Tetris.”
There’s also the human achievement aspect. Some players have developed the ability to play versions of Tetris so fast that you can’t help but be in awe. A guy who goes by the name Blink is one example. We interviewed him for the series, and my immediate reaction, even seeing him play right in front of me, was: “He’s not actually doing this. It can’t be real!” I’m pretty sure I even said that on camera. And the whole time, he’s talking to us like it’s easy. I don’t know if his segment will be a bonus feature, but maybe we can embed one of his YouTube clips here just to show how wild other versions of Tetris can be.
Chris: Yeah, I’m actually putting the whole Blink thing into Episode 7, a bonus feature for people who pay for the show. I got his interview down to 22 minutes, and he is just casually playing at like 200 miles per hour during most of it. Carl and I were losing our minds.
At one point he says, “I’m not great on this laptop,” as he’s crushing other players at top speed. He’s faster with his big desktop keyboard, apparently. He also mentions how he was number one in the world on like five different versions of Tetris at various times. I asked him which ones and he said, “I don’t want to brag,” and I go, “Please brag!” So he lists the games. Legend.
The CTWC uses a version of Tetris that was already ancient when the tournament started. Who wrangles that hardware? What’s that like?
Chris: CTWC uses the original Nintendo Tetris, released in 1989, played on original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) consoles and controllers. At this point, most of our top competitors are younger than the game they play.
The cartridges are generally not a problem — they’re cheap and plentiful, and they typically don’t break down. Over the years, CTWC has bought a huge stock of them and simply has to keep the connector pins clean.
The NES consoles are another story. They were designed to mimic a VCR, where you slide a game into a front slot and push it down so it clicks into place. This spring-loaded design fails over time in various ways: the slot connector wears out, and the springs lose tension. Every year, CTWC volunteers refurbish any consoles that act flaky by taking them apart and cleaning or replacing worn parts. Amazingly, there are still new parts being produced for these old machines.
When I was a referee in the early years of the CTWC, I often saw consoles glitch in unexpected ways. For instance, one year a player got frustrated during a game and slammed the table with his hand. That slam caused a neighboring Nintendo console to freeze, prematurely ending another person’s game! Fortunately, that was during qualifying, not tournament play, so we just gave the frozen player another shot. But it’s typical of what happens when you use hardware that’s several decades old. We had to pull that freezing console and replace it with another one. (There are lots of spares.)
The other big problem is the CRT TVs. Players prefer these old boxy TVs because they all have similar internal hardware and identical timing. In a game where moves must be performed within a window of one-sixtieth of a second, precise timing is vital—and flat-screen TVs vary widely in response times. But these old TVs are slowly failing, and repairs are difficult. Fortunately, the CTWC takes place within a larger retro gaming expo, so we often have hardware experts around — both within the CTWC team and in the wider expo — to disassemble and repair TV sets on the fly. So far, we’re managing to stay ahead of the problem, but it’s not a permanent fix. There are no new CRT TVs being made, and eventually all of them will be broken.
For now, we usually try to have extra TVs on hand because they fail fairly often. One of them broke this past June during tournament play — we had to remove it from the stage, replace it, and replay that round. It just turned off and wouldn’t come back on.
Another classic story is what we call “Sleepgate.” Years back, we had one TV with a built-in sleep timer function that we referees weren’t aware of. We discovered it when, in the middle of play, a large onscreen graphic appeared, counting down for a full minute until the TV simply turned itself off (!). We ended up “retiring” that TV by putting a huge “X” made of tape over its screen and setting it aside.
Have you ever had Tetris dreams?
Chris: Yes, but only when I was actively learning a new concept. So these dreams have come and gone over the years. In them, I’m often watching a game and trying to figure out where to put each piece. I also sometimes “see” Tetris pieces when I close my eyes, even when I’m awake. I think my brain is working that problem in the background, and it comes to the front when my eyes close.
Many interviewees for Best of Five reported similar things. They dreamed about Tetris shapes when first learning the game, but the dreams faded over time. Several also reported stress dreams about losing to their key rivals! I’ve never been good enough at the game to have a rival, so that’s not a problem for me.
The music on Best of Five is clearly reminiscent of the soundtrack to the original game without directly quoting it. How did you approach adapting the music for Best of Five? What was your most frustrating challenge and most rewarding solution?
Carl: I actually did directly quote the music from Classic NES Tetris. In the game, there’s a piece called “Korobeiniki,” which is a 19th-century folk song. I did a rock version of it, and Higgins used it as the ending credits for each episode. I pulled apart its main motif and varied it throughout the series in major and minor keys on all sorts of instruments. I snuck it in everywhere I could, mainly so the music felt integrated — conceptual glue.
The opening credits were modeled after Baba O’Riley by The Who (Higgins liked the vibe of that song), overlaid with an arpeggiated nod to Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. I wrote it in 5/4 as a reference to the name of the series. By the end, I’m jamming all three of those elements together.
One thing I discovered about myself — and this surprised me — is how heavily I’m influenced by Rush. My favorite cue, “Jonas Is Different,” has all those Rush-isms going on: the odd meter, the Lydian mode, and my Rickenbacker through the Geddy Lee 2112 pedal. You’d think I would have figured that out after all these years of copying them.
The only frustrating challenge during the project was my self-doubt. It was a long, detailed job, and tough to see the big picture and how it would all fit together. The time I could devote each week was limited, so in any given session, I might be working on the nuances of the third rhythm guitar part, snare ghost notes, or french horns for some tiny part of a scene. I’d come back the next week and work on the bass guitar or 8-bit synths for another scene in a different episode. I had to trust my skills.
There was a point where I doubted the music would meet my standards, but it was more important to get it done than to have it be perfect. In the middle of it, I got a pinched nerve in my neck, which caused extreme pain in my right arm. Very tough to work. I told Higgins: “Even if I end up in the hospital, this thing is getting finished.” A few days before the score was due, I finished the last cue, exported the master WAV files, closed my eyes, and listened through headphones. By that point, I could barely remember writing any of the music. It was surreal — like listening to an 80-minute album someone recorded in my style but without lead vocals or a lead melody. I considered the interview clips and narration to serve that role in the music.
In the end, every musical skill I’ve developed got the job done. It was a disciplined and analytical process, not just “having fun and making music” like someone might imagine. As for a rewarding solution — there’s a scene called “Harry and Jonas Rivalry Part 1” that starts with me yelling “One, two, three!” and an odd drum fill. The only reason it’s there is to cover up a timing issue I had getting out of the previous scene. Sometimes, you can solve a technical problem by distracting from it. It’s funny to me that I got away with it.
Do you think Tetris has achieved (or will achieve) the same universal status as other culturally embedded games like chess, checkers, or poker?
Chris: I don’t think Tetris has achieved that status yet. But I do think it’s possible, and frankly I hope I live to see it. For many years, folks have petitioned to make chess an Olympic sport, and I think that makes sense. Tetris is literally the ONLY video game I can imagine reaching that kind of status. Its ruleset is relatively simple, and it has an elemental quality that feels akin to chess, checkers, and poker, as you mentioned. It’s hard to think of any other video game that has these qualities, even the older ones.
During filming, Vince Clemente, one of the tournament’s founders who still runs it today, commented on this. He said something like: “Imagine that you’re playing baseball 20 years after it was invented. It’s baseball! It’s a legitimate sport! It must have been obvious that the game of baseball was a good sport even when it was new. That’s where we are with Tetris, except now it’s 40 years old.” (Actually he said “30,” because the interview was 10 years ago!)
