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Tetris (Game Boy) world record holder talks about his time spent with the game & approach to playing
The following comment comes from a Vice interview with Uli Horner, the world record holder in Tetris on Game Boy. He has the score of 441 lines and points tally of 748,757.
"Game Boy Tetris is horrible in a way because you get genuinely random pieces. It's truly random—it's always a one in seven chance, so you can always end up with horrible combinations that just kill you. All the other versions of Tetris have something readable in there—allegedly, it's easier to consistently play well on other versions. So even I will mess up games on the Game Boy version, which is really frustrating, because you're beating the bell curve—you have to play a thousand times to get a few nice games. Some of the other versions, you can approach them with tactics that will always work.
...So, you turn the game up to level nine at the beginning, because points are awarded proportionally to the difficulty—the higher, the more you get. It goes up to level 20, and that's the ceiling, that's from 200 lines. So as soon as you've made 200 lines, you're playing the game at its toughest. And at that stage, any mistake just kills you. At that point, my brain is constantly putting the preview in the field, so I'm not even consciously aware of what's happening on the field. It sounds sophisticated, but if you play 10,000 games of Tetris, you'd be able to do it, too. I had a friend who I quite quickly taught to reach 400,000 points. It's not that hard—it's just seven pieces, to arrange in a field. I could probably sit here and get 500,000 while talking to you. That's about my average."