Frank [00:00:24] Welcome to the Piece Dependency Podcast. I’m your host, Frank, also known as SirMaser. In 2021, a new classic Tetris documentary will be released called Best of Five: The Classic Tetris Champions. Reason enough to talk to director Chris Higgins about the upcoming documentary. We also talked about his role in the Classic Tetris World Championships. This is our conversation. 

Frank [00:00:53] Chris, welcome to the Piece Dependency Podcast and thank you for doing this. 

Chris [00:00:58] Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. 

Frank [00:01:00] First question is always the same question to everyone who is new on the podcast. And that is, how did you get into NES Tetris? 

Chris [00:01:06] I’ve been looking forward to this question. Um. I think I was interested to introduces to NES Tetris by Adam Cornelius, who’s the director of Ecstasy of Order and one of the founders of the Classic Tetris World Championship. He’s an old friend. We went to college together and we both also moved to Portland, Oregon, which is very, very far away from where we went to college together. But I remember going over to his house. It must have been 15 years ago, something like that. And he was playing and he was playing NES Tetris at his house, in 2005 or 2006 or something like that. And he was already at that time interested in doing stuff with it and said—well, he handed me the controller was like, hey, you want to try this. And I tried it for about two seconds and said, nope, too hard. Too hard. But yeah, that’s actually the majority of my involvement in Tetris has come from being somebody who’s like a referee or a filmmaker or a writer. I’ve written articles about it. But I’m really not a player. People ask me my personal best and I’m like, I don’t have one. Yet?

Frank [00:02:19] How many times have you played the game? 

Chris [00:02:21] I was thinking about this recently. I think if you had to add up every single time I have picked up NES Tetris and played a game, it is definitely under 100. It’s probably under 50 maybe. 

Frank [00:02:36] Yeah.

Chris [00:02:36] It’s very low. I mean, and so the thing is, I don’t know if that’s—there probably are a lot of people who are in the category with me who I have watched and been, you know, right next to so much Tetris. But I have played so little Tetris that, you know, I’m a good example of even if you know what you’re doing intellectually, it doesn’t mean you’re good at the game. You need actual experience with using your fingers to make it happen. 

Frank [00:03:07] Are you just not interested in playing the game?

Chris [00:03:10] Yeah. I mean it’s—I think about it like I think about certain sports, right? There are people who can be a fan of, say, you know, soccer or something, but they don’t—and they might play around with it a little bit—but they don’t necessarily go out and, you know, actually play. Or like if you’re interested in watching tennis, right? You don’t necessarily go and buy a tennis racket and get tennis balls and go find a court and get good at it. Right? 

Frank [00:03:38] I know. 

Chris [00:03:39] Yeah. So that’s been my experience. 

Frank [00:03:42] I have the same feeling with hockey. I watch hockey almost all the time. But I’ve never—I used to be a long distance speed skater. So we have a hockey rink in the middle of our oval. And when I was doing training, the hockey players were always playing, but I was always interested in watching it, but never actually playing it. So then a couple of years back, I thought to watch the NHL, I started following following the Dutch hockey scene. But I’m not interested in playing it. I just love to see it. Is that the same what you have with Tetris? 

Chris [00:04:14] Very much so. And part of why I wouldn’t want to play hockey is because I feel like I’d be hurt and be injured. And so that’s sort of the same thing with Tetris. It’s like when you spend—when you’ve spent your entire Tetris life around the literal best players in the world, like five feet away from them—that’s been my role—then you just know that if you say, well, I’m going to start from zero, you know, then the outcome is a little bit more disappointing than if you just started from zero by yourself with no prior expectations. I will say I might take up the game as kind of a stunt as part of this Kickstarter we’re going to talk about, because I think it would be interesting to take someone who really has not attempted to play the game at all. I mean, you know, I think I came across it certainly. I probably played it on a Nintendo or a Gameboy. I never had a cartridge. I never owned a Gameboy. I you know, so I never owned this game, except it was on everything. I mean, I probably played it on a cell phone, you know, but I never had a phase in my life where I was, you know, actually playing it. But I think it might be funny and/or instructive to say, OK, well, what happens when you take somebody who should know intellectually what they’re doing and just try it? 

Frank [00:05:31] It sounds like a GameScout video. It sounds like a video he would make a topic about. 

Chris [00:05:36] Yeah. And he’s been like, by the way, he’s really been been doing an amazing job lately. So I’ve been communicating with him a little bit about how these videos come together. And I think that’s exactly what I think. I think there’s a lot of side quests when you go into making a Tetris film where you think, well, here’s a little side topic that doesn’t fit into the main thing. But it would make a great YouTube video look great, a great, you know, SongScout or GameScout video and why not like, let’s let’s just go ahead and take some of those things and not try to push them into the middle of your documentary about a tournament and just make up anyway. 

Frank [00:06:11] Yeah. Just one video on the Internet, what you want to see and doesn’t really fit the Classic Tetris channel, to be honest, topic that he makes on, but for for his channel and what he’s done since I believe 2018, it suits his channel. 

Chris [00:06:26] Yeah. And I think there’s there’s a curiosity, like a genuine intellectual curiosity, about how do people play. Why do they play. And then a generosity of, like, explaining things to people. And I think that that explanation, the ability to be clear and straightforward when explaining something is really valuable. And it’s a real skill and talent that he has. So I—you know, if there’s anything I can offer to new NES Tetris players, I’ll be glad to do it. Although I think the main thing I’ll offer is just that it’s a lot harder than it looks. And I know that not just for myself, but because I’ve been at all of these tournaments starting in 20—I think 2011 was my first one and 2012 was the first one where I worked. And we had an issue where people would walk by and they would just say, well, I could do better than that. And you’d say, well, there’s Nintendo. Grab a controller, give it a shot, and you would start them on even 9, much less 18. And they would just go, Oh, oh, oh oh! 

Frank [00:07:26] I fell into the same trap the first day I picked up PAL Tetris. I thought level 9, OK, that’s a good level to start on. I topped out with like 30,000 points. People who have been to CTWC in Portland might have seen you and known you, but a lot of people in the community may never have heard of you. Can you introduce yourself and tell us what you have already done within the Classic Tetris scene? 

Chris [00:07:52] Yeah, so my name is Chris Higgins and I have been a referee or a judge or a camera operator at CTWC starting in 2012. I also worked on Ecstasy of Order, so I was a writer on that film. I wrote parts of the narration and taglines and stuff like that. I’m a longtime friend of Adam Cornelius who directed that film. So I’ve been just sort of—because I live in a relatively small town and he’s here, whenever someone has needed help with things, it’s like natural for him to call his friend and have me come over and do it. So if you go back and look at the video of any CTWC, like anything that’s actually in the Portland era, I’m probably in it. Like I’m in all the ESPN specials. I’m usually running a camera up by the front. And so recently, like in the last I’d say two or three years, my role has been to run most of the camera stuff. And by that I mean operate literally like just be the person with hands on cameras. And we usually have anywhere from I mean, we used to have four, but now I think we had something like nine or ten cameras last year. So it’s a department, really. And so you’re getting instructions over a headset to go and, you know, you know, get this thing or, you know, go refocus on someone because the camera’s just, you know, decided to autofocus somewhere else. And running back and forth. So I’ve helped to make the the tournaments happen and helped transition them into kind of the modern era of being recorded and filmed, you know, relatively well. And I also, because of being part of Ecstasy of Order, Adam and I would sit around and talk about doing a sequel. Right? And so a few months before the 2014 tournament, he said—he just he just called me up and said, well, maybe six months before, it was a good ways before that one—he called me up and said, why don’t you just make a sequel to the movie? Because this will be the fifth year. I made a movie about the first year. And so much has changed, but we never made a movie about it. And I said, OK, and that’s, you know, and then that was that was six years ago. Right. So time passes. 

Frank [00:10:09] Oh, we will definitely be talking about that documentary in a bit. But during CTWC, while you handle the cameras, what kind of production goes behind filming CTWC?

Chris [00:10:19] It’s a very special challenge and I’m glad you asked. For one thing, it’s important to understand that the the era of kind of the modern era of TreyVision, like the sort of HD games, started in probably 2016, maybe 2015, and a visual language got developed and that language evolved. We have either a two-up display or a four-up display. Now prior to this what we had, I’m not kidding, was they would just run one of the analog outputs out of an NES, into a security camera switcher thing. And so if you imagine that your job is to say like you’re a guard and you have four, eight, or sixteen cameras to monitor, it just puts, it tiles them together in an analog way so you can watch them on a television set. This is a device that’s from like the 70s. Maybe. Very, very, very low quality. But it had a way to do a two-up mode and it had a way to do a four-up mode or sixteen-up mode. And you can see that in Ecstasy of Order. That’s what’s being projected. And that’s what they projected in like, you know, the first, second, third, fourth, fifth. That’s what all we had, including in 2014 when I shot the film. But it was very clear that this is not, uh, this isn’t really great, right? so in 2014, we added webcams, which were, you know, 2014 era webcams and OBS existed. And so we were able to put together a thing where you could see the little faces of people and stuff. But it was really rough. It was really, really rough. In the modern era, essentially after Trey came on, Trey essentially leveled the whole thing up. And I’m not sure who specifically it was, but I remember being there when this discussion happened, the idea of having players, putting the cameras, they crisscross. So imagine you have two players seated in front of a television. They’re looking straight at their own television. We wanted to create a visual effect where it looked like they were looking at their stack and their stack was going to be in the middle of the screen. So to do that, you had to put a camera off in front of the other person’s TV and then tilt it over. You would like, you know, rotate it. And so you would crisscross, you would be pointing the right one at the left player and vice versa. And typically we have four of these cameras up front because you have four TVs up front. Then we’d also have—that’s kind of the basic, that’s the baseline thing you would need, and so you need at least, you know, one person to operate those cameras because people move around. And then we started adding cameras like the hand cams. So in the final matches, we put one of the cameras way up high, tilt it down and get the hands on the controllers. And I think we’ll see more of that in the future. We also last year we had, when Alexey came, we just sort of rented some more cameras. And by the way, these are kind of semi-pro camcorders. They’re not like—I mean, if you went to buy them at the store, they’ll be a thousand dollars, or something like that. But the problem is we have to rent like six or eight or ten of them. So we needed something that’s like very simple and straightforward so I could go through and configure every single one of them to be the same. So in 2019, a good example is everything was running at 60 frames per second, six zero. It’s a very dark room, despite trying to add light to it. And we had four across the front for the players. We had one off to the left which was kind of where Arda and kind of the the interviews would happen. And that’s where Alexey was. And that position over to the left would allow you also to turn that camera and look at the broader stage. And then back in the audience, which was—that was a huge room in 2019—in the audience, we had the commentary table kind of in the middle of the crowd and one of those camcorders was straight—you know, pointing straight at those commentators. And there was no person to run that camera and there was usually no way to get through the audience to get to it. And so I was just like hoping that it was working, you know? So I’d go in there and we’d wire everything up and get power to everything and make sure of the memory card was as big as humanly possible and just hit record and go. But in the past couple of years, it’s at a point now where we all have headsets, wireless, you know, intercom systems, and we have at least one camera operator who is remote, with a wireless video link. And last year that was James Rexroad. And so you would say basically anybody who was on the mic would say, hey, James, turn around, like turn to your left. Look in the you know, look between these two rows of people, there’s going to be a little girl and she wants to count down the Tetris. And he would turn around and you would watch his video. And I remember doing this saying, like, trust me, this one’s going to be worth it, you know? And then someone gets down there and you get the shot, right. And then all that stuff is getting recorded individually. Plus the the actual broadcast stream that’s going out is being recorded in two or three or four ways. I forget how many we ended up doing. At the end of the day, there was just so much data that, you know, after Saturday night, I would go home and dump, I want to say 15 memory cards?

Frank [00:15:58] Oof.

Chris [00:15:58] Yeah, the total data size across just two days was almost five terabytes of video. It was an incredible amount of video. And there’s audio recorders all over the place. And it’s a huge operation. And a lot of it really is Trey Harrison, you know, having set up his—he literally is like a wizard behind the curtain because he’s back there behind a curtain. And the most fun is when he comes out to play and you just kind of cross your fingers and hope everything stays working right? 

Frank [00:16:29] There’s panic when Trey is playing a game at the CTWC. 

Chris [00:16:33] Anything could happen. One thing that was kind of fun last year, in 2019, was we were in the first rounds I think on Sunday and Matt Schoolmaster’s game, someone noticed he had no blue pieces or something like that. It wasn’t like no blue or no red. And we’re watching it. The game is definitely happening. But you look at it and you’re like, huh, how is that, how is that possible? And just panic set in because like the event is occurring, you can’t stop anything. It took us probably fifteen minutes to fix this. But what it was in the end was an RCA cable, just a, you know, little video, little thin video cable that was 25 or 30 feet long had gone bad. It had gone bad between when it was installed on Wednesday and that Sunday morning. It worked on Saturday and it just suddenly—it had dropped into black and white mode somehow—like it wasn’t passing color data. And so the thing on Trey’s end would recognize that, and it could figure out, you know, two different shades. I could figure out white and something else. Yeah. But it couldn’t figure out the third color. So anyway, we were we were very concerned, and it took a while to figure out exactly what that was. But it’s it’s telling that for the most part, we haven’t had massive tech failures, you know, live in major events. It’s only a matter of time. But these things are very fragile. 

Frank [00:17:59] Don’t jinx it. 

Chris [00:18:01] Right! I think I just jinxed it. But I mean, like, one of the biggest things in setting it up would be like we had to go and set up all of our cameras and then tape everything to the floor, like all the cabling, because all of it is a trip hazard. And if anybody, like, pulls a thing out of, you know, if you pull the power out of a camera, all of a sudden you’ve got big, big problems ,or power out of an NES, or whatever. So there’s a big team. The camera team is usually, you know, five or six people. And it’s a it’s a labor of love. Like for the most part, people don’t get paid. Or if they do, it’s you know, it’s a token sum, but it is very exciting and very, very visceral to be two feet away from Joseph running the hand cam. Right? And just being like, I am watching this happen in front of me, I can smell the green tea, you know what I’m saying? I used to reach out. This is the thing I used to do with the hand cam. Greentea would put his his tea down and it would block the hand cam. So I would just reach out and move the tea over and over again and he would reach over for his tea and it just moved. Right. I felt really bad, but I was like, well it’s what you gotta do, right. 

Frank [00:19:09] It’s funny. It’s the second Greentea ancedote that we had on the podcast because Marc was telling a story about he was, Greentea was playing guideline Tetris in the middle of the queue of qualifying for classic Tetris. 

Chris [00:19:23] Right. Right. Yeah. Greentea. One of the I mean I think also I’ve seen more, you know, in the last couple of weekends. I love watching a player who is expressive. Right? Who’s having—I mean, honestly like if they’re having a good time or bad time, that’s less of my concern. But I just love seeing emotion. And Greentea is like an open book. Like this is what I’m feeling. I am going for it. It’s great. I love to watch it. It’s a bummer we couldn’t see him this year, but I am confident we’ll see him in future years. 

Frank [00:19:54] Yeah. He had good reasons not to—

Chris [00:19:57] He had good reasons. Yeah. Yeah. Surprise, surprise!

Frank [00:20:00] Yeah. What’s it like to be head referee for a world championship?

Chris [00:20:05] Very confusing. And I’ll tell you, the first year I did it was I mean I was not head referee in 2012, but I was head referee in 2013 and then kind of onward for a while. And part of why it’s confusing is because you have to—well, the first thing I asked was, well, what am I refereeing if I don’t know this game all that well? And I initially I didn’t. Now I do. What am I looking for? Right? And so it boils down to, for the most part, you’re dealing with gently explaining to people what the rules are. Because you have a mix, you’ve always had a mix from day one in CTWC where people come in and they’ll qualify and they don’t know what the rules are. They don’t know you have to start on level 9 and higher, for example, in a qualifier. And so I would have to go over and find somebody who’d been playing from level 0 and they were on 8 and I hadn’t seen it. And I’d walk over and have to say, I’m sorry, you need to stop your game and start over again. And so the process of being a referee, really a lot of it is sort of just telling people what to do in a gentle and confident way. Making sure that you maximize the turnover of those stations. So saying that, like, you know, my wife and I actually were we did it together for a couple of years where, you know, she and I would be—she’d be at one end of the line and I’d be at the other end of the line so we could immediately identify when a game ended. And I would just kind of be like getting that person out of that chair so she could send that next person over there. And I would hold up a hand and point and hold up a hand and point, just to get that moving, to keep it moving as fast as we possibly could. Because, you know, it’s important to maximize, you know, the attempts you get. The thing that we really worry about is technical malfunctions. And those do happen where like someone—even just unplugging your controller and walking away, sometimes that’s enough movement to pause someone else’s game or, you know, cause their NES to malfunction. 

Frank [00:22:06] Really?

Chris [00:22:07] Yeah, I’ve seen it several times. And it’s been kind of controversial at times because people have been having very good games. And, you know, there was an incident and I’m not going to say who it was or whatever, but the point was someone was having a pretty good game, like 700s, 800s, something like that. And somebody else had a bad game and was mad. And so they kind of slammed the table and the other NES glitched out and froze. 

Frank [00:22:32] Oh, no. 

Chris [00:22:32] Yeah. And so what do you do? As the referee, you have to make a call in that exact moment that is fair and that is, you know, something. Like you are the person in charge. So like in those kinds of cases, I would say—I’d essentially say I need you to not hit the table if you’re angry. It’s OK to be angry. Just don’t make somebody else’s game suffer for it. I would also do things that are just functional, like if I saw a machine that was having glitches, I would retire that NES. I would just say I would rather have no one play this than have more than one person suffer, you know, a lost game on it. And so I would turn those off and then just raise the flag for someone else that we need to go get another NES or another TV or whatever. There was a thing in 2017 where like a TV had a sleep mode and it kept popping up a timer on top of the display after being on for like an hour or something, and we could not find any interface to turn it off. And that ruined a game as well. And so we began—we’ve developed these really elaborate procedures to say when a referee or—when someone has seen a Nintendo or a TV act badly, we need to physically mark that so that everyone else knows this is what happened. Don’t use this again. So they don’t take that TV and put it on the stage and have that happen during, you know, championship play. 

Frank [00:23:56] That would be terrible. 

Chris [00:23:57] Honestly, that’s a real problem because, you know, we are working with old, unreliable equipment. And we’ve we’ve been fortunate. And part of that is we do maintenance. You know, we do take apart these machines and clean them. And there is a burn-in period. So when I would go in and do it, I would set things up and burn in every machine for hours, like make sure they were running. They could withstand, you know, jiggling movement, shaking, slamming. And it’s important to do that because if you don’t, then all of a sudden you’re going to lose a match at some point. 

Frank [00:24:31] This year, you were a judge for the CTWC qualifying. What’s it like to fulfill that role this year? 

Chris [00:24:38] It was fascinating. It was so fascinating. And this year, so what I did was I judged qualifiers, but I didn’t judge the main event because I just wanted to watch the main event because it’s my—it’s like the World Series for me. Like I wanted just to say I’m sitting back and just enjoying this. So in qualifiers, I think I did the most people. I did something like 34 independent qualifiers and they started on every half hour. And so what would happen is I would—the time would come—well prior to the time I would get on Discord and send a message to the person saying, Here’s who I am and I’m going to walk you through some steps. And some of them you know about and some of them you might not know about. And then, you know, hopefully they would reply and we, you know, get on the get on a, you know, a voice call and I would walk them through various steps. So show me your, you know, controller, show me all these things. And force them through a process of verifying that their equipment was real and was actually plugged in and stuff like that. And it was—I mean, for one thing, we did have a ton of equipment failures in qualifiers. I saw probably five or six times when an NES just froze, for seemingly no reason. I saw times when they froze for obvious reasons because somebody threw a controller or whatever. Not saying, not gonna to say who. But, you know, it’s clear when that happens. And again, but the thing that I liked about it—and you’d have to make a decision, right. So, OK, if that happened, does the game count? Do you get extra time? You know, all these sorts of things. But the main thing, the thing that I loved about it was that it was similar to the idea of doing it in person. I felt like I had a one on one connection with these people and I was rooting for all of them. I’m like, you’re my player. Like, I’m going to watch you on mute. You know, I’m going to watch your little game playing for two hours. And I’m going to go back and review the best games you had. And I get to see you like your house or whatever, you know? And often they’d have to call me back because something went wrong or whatever, and they had to reverify. But you kind of develop a little bit of a working relationship with people where you’re like, OK, here we go. Well, your controller came off? OK, fine. Let’s plug it back in, turn the camera around, do this thing. I loved having those moments with players. 

Frank [00:26:56] What was your most memorable moments during the qualifying. 

Chris [00:26:59] Huh. My most memorable moment. [clears throat] Honestly. So, you know, the context of the world that we’re in today, right. I’m living in the U.S. I’m on the West Coast and we’re under a pretty serious lockdown. So, I have not had a haircut since February. I don’t leave the house very often. So I have I’ve developed a world where I’m in the house and my wife and I have a treadmill in our garage where the car usually is. But we have other reasons to put things in the garage these days. So in the morning I go out and I get on that treadmill. And early on, I think it was Monday or Tuesday before—the way we had it set up, we had different [judges] in different time zones who had said, OK, from UTC, you know, this time to that time I’m going to take people every half hour. And so I said, well, I’m just like broadly available for this huge period. And Vince, I think very rightly said, let’s trim that down. So, you know, Chris, you’re going to be available like, you know, I think it’s 1pm to 4pm, your local—my local time. And I said, well, OK, I don’t know. But turns out, yeah, if you do if you do eight people a day, you get very tired very fast. But in the mornings I’d get up and get on the treadmill and I had a like an iPad in front of me and I’d just fire up Twitch and see who was qualifying. And the most notable thing was when I fired up, I think it was Anna D. 

Frank [00:28:26] Anna, yes. 

Chris [00:28:26] Yeah, and I’m just watching this and I have the chat open and I’m just watching this thing happen. And it’s very much like, you know, game scouts video where I had that realization, like everybody had that realization, which was like, oh OK, so you’re somebody building on the left. I’ve seen that happen, you know, build for a left well, I had seen that in other qualifiers already. But the realization of like, oh, this player is terrific. Like, this person is like top tier, you know—she’s got a shot. And so realizing when she’s getting these pieces over there like this is somebody who, you know, next year—I was just so excited to see a brand new player. And by the way, the audio on that was so bad. And I was listening to it on my headphones like doing my morning workout. And I’m like, I can’t hear what you’re saying. It sounds like it’s like a fan in her computer, it sounds like an aircraft or something. 

Frank [00:29:21] Profile picture on her Twitch page is now an airplane because of that stream. 

Chris [00:29:25] Yeah. Yeah. But it was just such a delight. It’s a delight to see new players or to see players where you’ve never seen their faces before. You’ve seen them play in CTMs and stuff. But to actually get a glimpse of them as humans. So that was one. You know, watching, I guess it was HydrantDude, you know, watching that qualifier, that was something. I was actually the qualifier judge for both Dog and PixelAndy, both of which were amazing qualifiers. But there’s this moment where PixelAndy is playing and for some reason Dog just walks in the door. 

Frank [00:30:00] Yeah.

Chris [00:30:00] I didn’t know they were brothers. 

Frank [00:30:03] Almost nobody knew. 

Chris [00:30:05] Nobody knew. And I didn’t have like special information or anything. It was just like, OK, here’s this person’s like Twitch handle and you know, like when they said they signed up. So I’m sitting there and I’m just like, wait, what? Did you see that? What, what? So that was a delight. And the fact—here’s the overall thing. The fact that qualifiers were by themselves like a really fun week of, like, awesome Tetris? I did not anticipate that. I thought qualifiers was going to be boring and like, you know, like who’s going to want to watch this? But when that week was over, it felt like we had just watched like a tournament. It was super fun. 

Frank [00:30:43] I loved it, really. Every day later in the week, they showcased on ClassicTetris, all the qualifiers at the same time. The love from the community, and it was so fun to—like we said, you could practically watch Tetris 24 hours a day because if you were sleeping and someone else in a different time zone were qualifying, you could watch that VOD back. It was a lovely week. 

Chris [00:31:09] Well, and I guess I also have to say, watching Joseph. I mean. It was…I commented later that it was like the moon landing, right? I think people will say, where were you when Joseph got all those max-outs in two hours? 

Frank [00:31:25] I was asleep. 

Chris [00:31:26] Well, I was lucky enough to be watching it. And my wife tuned in as well. She was actually in quarantine, like self-imposed. She had, you know, had to go traveling and was coming back. But we were both watching it in two locations and we just kept texting each other just being like, did you see that? What’s happening? You know, ahhh! Because because both of us had been at the tournament physically and had, like, met Joseph and, you know, worked with him on qualifying before, there’s like a little bit of an extra connection there. It doesn’t matter. Like you’re watching the greatest, like you’re watching the greatest of all time and you’re just watching that person, it’s another day at the office. He walks in and just lays everything out and, you know, then just walks off and, you know, takes a bio break and comes back and then does some more. Like, you know, no big deal. 

Frank [00:32:13] It’s natural, yeah. Hey, we’re coming off of two weekends of double elimination qualifying tournaments, this all for a spot at the top eight main event. What did you think about these eight qualifying brackets? 

Chris [00:32:30] I thought the best of five format was brutal. But I thought that it was brutal in a way that made it fair and also made it so that, like, I had the experience every day of, you know, starting the Tetris in the morning. And for me, it was sort of midday. And so I’d start one channel and we had to we had to set up a way to watch two channels of Twitch at once. But, you know, we figured it out. And for about the first three or four hours, I’m like, OK, I’m really paying attention to this. I’m really into this. But then there came this level of exhaustion. And normally in an in-person CTWC, all of this stuff is happening at such an accelerated rate, like there’s the people on stage, but there’s also people kind of off on side stations and they’re just trying to get matches done with. You know, so the early ones, one’s going to be like seed 1 versus seed 64. We’ll, like, get that done and over with and just move those people out. This was different because everybody got best of five potentially twice or three times or four times or five times. So watching Nenu and watching for example Jonas. Jonas played a lot of games. It was a lot of fun for me to watch that. But also there was a level of exhaustion as a viewer where I was sort of like, I’m kind of ready to be done with this Tetris at this point? It kind of was too much Tetris for me to handle. But on the other hand, like, I’d rather have that that not enough. So I did download all the VODs as well because I’m like, there’s stuff I missed on Channel Two and I was watching Channel One and vice versa. So it was a it was a beautiful thing to see and the ability for people to go through that comeback, that second chance bracket and make their way back up. That’s amazing. And that it actually occurred is like fascinating. So like to watch people battle and play, you know, twenty plus games at such a high level is amazing to me, and I think it really speaks to the level of play. The level of play here obviously is the highest by far that we’ve ever seen. And every year we keep thinking like, well, the level of play we’re seeing cannot be exceeded. What will it be next year? Like where can we go from here? 

Frank [00:34:38] Because of the world we’re living right now, it had to be online, but that’s also the part why the level of play is so high. Because normally people who can’t make it for various reasons to Portland are now—can now play for the world championship. And people who crack it during the CTM Masters events or during Classic Tetris League, they can play right now. And I think that is one of the reasons why the level of play is so high this year. 

Chris [00:35:09] Yeah, and this is a thing that—I think Americans are extremely bad at understanding that there is a rest of the world. And so we tend to name things world championships that are functionally U.S. championships, right? 

Frank [00:35:23] Baseball.

Chris [00:35:23] So, yeah, exactly. The World Series. I mean, obviously no one else plays baseball anywhere else, so whatever. You know, so this is a classic American cultural problem. This year we had the opportunity to actually see a world championship. Right. And I think that there are elements of that that we have to learn from, regardless of what happens next year, if we have if we do have an in-person thing at all or not, because that’s the thing. We always knew it was a real problem, a huge expense. And this is part of what my film, by the way, ends up being about. Like it’s an incredible expense, even if you live in the States to fly to Portland, Oregon, and get a hotel for, you know, potentially four days or something and then fly home and buy all your meals and all this stuff. So it’s something that was a huge limiter. And so when you take the financial limiter of the at least one thousand dollars, if not a lot more, just to go and everyone loses except one person, you know what I mean? Like, that’s a terrible burden. The idea that you could actually say, OK, listen, you need a minimal set of hardware. And yeah, it’s you know, that’s it’s not like that’s a free thing. You still have to have hardware and you have to have a computer that’s capable of doing this and an Internet connection and a camera. It’s a lot of stuff, but it’s not like thousands of dollars worth of stuff. It opens things up in a way that I think is fair and important and gives us—shows us—OK, if the question is who’s really the best in the world, I’m so glad to actually see more than, you know, one to three countries represented. Now, we do end up with a lot of Americans in this final bracket. But still along the way, we actually saw substantive gameplay from players who were not in that sort of U.S. centric scene. And I am so excited by that because I think it really does legitimize the concept of a world championship, right? 

Frank [00:37:27] Yeah. Yes. I do agree. We had a couple of international brackets. We had two all-American brackets and one bracket with one person from Antarctica. Is it true that that Quaid was representing Mars last year? 

Chris [00:37:45] I don’t know if I’m allowed to comment on, you know, interplanetary controversies. I can say that Quaid is actually in—I didn’t interview him, but he has mentioned a lot—and there are some moments that come up in in 2014 because Quaid got to max-out in qualifying. I think he got the first one that year. I think there had been one the year prior. So we grabbed him and had an interview with him and his attitude if I remember right. I mean this is paraphrasing but essentially Vince, you know, gets on the mic and says, OK, Quaid, you just got you’ve got to max-out in qualifying is a very unusual event, what do you have to say? And Quaid is like… I mean, he just sort of like… He does not care. He does not want to be— the what he’s the— the attitude he’s giving off is, I don’t care. So he’s saying I don’t care. I guess I’m good at Tetris. I guess I’ll go do another max-out now. I don’t know. Go Buco. And he just walks away, he just literally turns around and walks away. He does not care. And I would ask people like why do you think Quaid doesn’t care about Tetris? And everybody’s like, Quaid really cares about Tetris. You don’t get that good at Tetris you know, if you don’t really care. Quaid is playing a character. And I was like, oh, I’m so dumb. I just I never I didn’t grow up with, like, professional wrestling or whatever. So he’s basically, Quaid is our pro wrestler. And so I love seeing Quaid bring that kind of energy and that kind of unpredictability and the sort of Hauser/Kauser complexity that comes up and sort of these inside jokes, like the whole thing of yelling Buco, I think that was Quaid and his brother where they just picked a guy to just say his name? 

Frank [00:39:36] Yeah.

Chris [00:39:36] And now that’s a thing. Anyway, I. About the Mars thing in the Antarctica thing. I don’t know. 

Frank [00:39:47] No comment further. 

Chris [00:39:47] No comment. I mean, maybe I do know and I’m just not saying. 

Frank [00:39:51] We’ll return to the conversation with Chris in a minute. But first, if you’d like the Piece Dependency Podcast, help us grow. Please share the podcast with every Classic Tetris fan. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @piecedependency. You can like our Facebook page Piece Dependency Podcast. Subscribe to our YouTube channel where we have all the podcasts uploaded as full length. Also, you can listen to the Piece Dependency podcast on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast app. Join the Kingsman Tetris Friendlies Discord server. Besides the fact that a place to discuss everything PDP, you can also participate in some lovely friendlies or put your Elo on the line in the various Elo battle. Last but not least, if you have a suggestion for who we need to have on the next Piece Dependency Podcast, let us know through our socials, Discord channel, or send us an email: piecedependencypodcast@gmail.com. Now, let’s go back to the conversation with Chris, we’ll talk about the upcoming documentary, The Best of Five: The Tetris Champions. 

Frank [00:40:56] Hey Chris, the main reason you are here is that on Friday, October 30th, you announced that you are working on a new Classic Tetris documentary. It’s called The Best of Five: The Classic Tetris Champions. Before we go in depth, can you tell us what this documentary is about? 

Chris [00:41:13] Yeah. So on the—well, let’s back up. There’s a very important documentary that chronicles the beginning of the Classic Tetris World Championship. That documentary is called Ecstasy of Order, the Tetris Masters, I believe. And that film, you know, and I worked on that a little bit. And that film is about the beginning. Right? It’s about Robin Mihara and trying to figure out how we’re going to make this thing work. And it makes a lot of sense as a film. It’s a competition film. It also talks about Tetris. It also has emotional resonance. We talk about Thor and his story and what’s going on with him. And I think it’s a great film. Now, the thing was, I don’t think this is a spoiler to tell anybody. Well, let’s put it this way. For the first four years of CTWC, the same person wins. So by four years in, the community, which was, we thought, extremely large. Now, today, the community is a hundred times larger. But yeah, we thought, listen, can, can this guy be beaten? Right? Like we had this serious problem, which was, look, we all get together. People are paying all this money. They’re coming to this place. And it sure looks like we have an unbeatable player because he just comes in and just destroys. And that’s not a problem in the sense that I mean, clearly, he’s the greatest player. But at the same time, it’s not that much fun if you’re going to spend money and come and try to compete and then you’re just going to get destroyed. So when we came in for this, the fifth year, first of all, I wanted to check in on how—I want to make a film that just documented what is this tournament? Why does it matter and what’s going on here? But the biggest question, the big operative question every player was was struggling with was how can I beat the four-time champ or can I? Is it physically possible? So you had people who were trying to. Actually, maybe I’m going way too into this early. 

Frank [00:43:10] That’s all right. 

Chris [00:43:11] The point was, I just wanted to I wanted to pick a year and document what was happening and so go leading into it. So months in advance, I began following players, interviewing, as they were getting ready, as they were training and asking them, what do you think is going to happen? What are you worried about? Because there’s a lot of players in Portland where I live, I was able to go and just talk to them endlessly. And then when, you know, the tournament actually comes, I documented everything about that. So how do they actually set up the, you know, the NESs? How do we test them? Where are they? Like what does that all work? And then how does tournament day work? How what happens on the tournament evenings? What are those parties like? We actually had the party at my house that year and I think the next couple of years. Those parties are—the after-parties—are pretty fun, right? I wanted to show that stuff and also to explore the question of why do we have a scene so dominated by one player and can that person be defeated? And again, I don’t want to—like it’s difficult to tackle spoilers with something that happened six years ago. 

Frank [00:44:16] Yeah.

Chris [00:44:16] I got really lucky. Right? Like, I picked a really good year to ask that question. And I followed the right people because I happened to follow in depth like the people who ended up in, you know, positions one, two and three. And then I followed a bunch of other people who were lower down in the ranking. So we ended up with this very detailed look at the state of the tournament five years in. And I think that’s a really interesting thing to look at now that we’re eleven years in. It’s a very similar kind of thing. So as you have these sort of unbeatable players, people veer toward what that player is doing. So when Jonas was doing very well, people started trying to be Jonas-y. Right. And frankly, a lot of people really were trying to be like Harry. They were trying to adopt the things that Harry and to some extent Jonas were doing. And then when when Joseph came along, obviously people tried to be like Joseph. And those things change the fundamental tournament and the fundamental sort of meta of the game. So by by doing this film, I’m looking at the first time that that meta actually changed. And then that’s instructive for later, the fact that it’s changed again. And I think there will be, by the way, future movies. I don’t think I’ll direct them. But there has been some some thinking about, you know, there’s definitely been a second turn in how this all works. So we may see that in the future. 

Frank [00:45:47] You said that you came up with the idea with Adam Cornelius. how do you come up with an idea like this? And what’s the reason you wanted to do it five years after the original documentary? 

Chris [00:45:59] Yeah, I mean, I had actually worked earlier. I think it was that year, or the year before. Adam and I had tried to make a film, a documentary film together, about cryptocurrency. So like Bitcoin. Except w were focusing on the things that aren’t Bitcoin. The other—like there’s all these other coins. And the reason we did that was because Bitcoin had a kind of culture around it that could be a little bit. 

Frank [00:46:22] A bit dark. 

Chris [00:46:24] A bit dark, like there was a little bit of oddness there. But things like Dogecoin or Litecoin or whatever were more interesting and fun. So anyway, the point is he and I tried to make a film and we tried to crowdfund it for $75,000 I think is what we asked for and we got about ten thousand. We didn’t get it because it didn’t succeed. But we wanted to make this film and we were doing it in the conventional style, which is you say, OK, let’s make a documentary. We know how much it costs because we’ve worked on multiple features before. So let’s just ask for every dollar we know we would need to do it the best we can, right? Now, what we discovered was there is not enough market for the movie we’re trying to make, this the crypto-coin thing. And so we had to just drop that project and not do it. And so I found myself saying, well, look, you know, I want to make a movie. I still want to make a documentary about something. And so that’s sort of this plan B thing was, well, what about Classic Tetris? Right? Because it actually has changed so much since the first movie. It doesn’t even resemble the you know, the tournaments look different. They’re in different places. And now there’s five years of history. The beautiful thing about a tournament is that there’s always a climax. There’s a moment when people are going to be battling, they’re going to be playing against one another. And those moments are like, that’s what you want in a film. Like you want the film to not just be people talking about Tetris. And just like looking at Tetris. You want there to be stakes. You want it to matter. Like we want to care about this player and how is it going to turn out for this player. So the beauty of that format is it had a built in like climax to it. I knew that something would happen at the tournament, whatever it was. 

Frank [00:48:12] There has to be a final. 

Chris [00:48:12] Yeah, there has to be a final and there has to be a winner. 

Frank [00:48:15] Yeah.

Chris [00:48:15] And worst case scenario…that’s the wrong way to put it. But like for me, the best case scenario would be there was some kind of upset and then every other case was still acceptable, right? Because you wanted to see each individual person’s desires. You wanted them to say in their own words, why am I doing this? Why do I care? You want the audience to feel that with them. And you want—I wanted everyone to win, but I knew, of course, only one person can win. So everyone’s heart will be broken. Every single player is going to be heartbroken—. 

Frank [00:48:51] Except the winner. 

Chris [00:48:52] Right. Because there’s only the one winner. And so I wanted to be—you know, I wanted to show that because it actually is such an emotional thing. And when you do documentary film, it’s a difficult balance because sometimes you come in and ask someone to relive a moment that was very painful for them or that meant that, like, they didn’t get the outcome they wanted. But afterward, you’re saying please reflect on that for me. And I had to do that with—I went to L.A. the following summer and I sat down with Jonas and I sat down with Harry and I handed them an iPad that had the games on them and while we were taping an interview with them said watch this and tell me what’s happening. And they did. Uh, and it was not fun, I don’t think, for for Jonas certainly to watch that. But Jonas is a very nice person. And so Jonas sat there, he watched it, and he kind of shook his head and he was like, oh, you know, like he would make a mistake in the game and look at his own game. And years later, I think it was maybe 2017. Maybe 2018, he told Arda Ocal in an interview that that moment was actually the moment that made him decide not to retire because he realized—he hadn’t watched the games. Because, why would you? Because it was the game where, like, you know, something went bad for you. But in watching the game, he suddenly was like, oh, wait. I actually I think I know how I can play better here. And what’s fascinating is also when you go to Harry and you show him those games again, he also has the same reaction. He’s like, wait, I see something here that I can change. And when I say, OK, what is it? He’s like, I’m not going to tell you. [laughter] So there’s a difference there because, you know, with Jonas, you say, what is it? And he’ll just start diving into like, well, OK, if I do this thing over here. But Harry, Harry is just kind of like—he looks at it and he’s like, hmm, I see something I’m doing wrong. I think I know how to fix that. I’m going to fix that. And I’m not going to tell you what it is, which is delightful. 

Frank [00:50:53] How do you start on making a documentary? Who do you want to be working with? Are they, are those people that you know or worked with before, or are those people that are completely new to you? Who do like to have on your team? 

Chris [00:51:07] Yeah. So on this documentary, I had no funding. So and this is still I mean, now I’m running a Kickstarter six years later, but all the money that got spent on it came out of my bank account. And I’m not a wealthy man. So this was stuff where I had to make really careful decisions about who I would hire and how much I could afford to pay them. Right? Because I, you know, I was spending money in the hopes that someday down the line I’d be able to sell the movie and people would then pay for it, right? 

Frank [00:51:36] Yeah.

Chris [00:51:36] So what I did initially was I didn’t hire anybody. I went in by myself. So there’s a lot of interviews in the early days where I would go in and I would bring the lights and the sound and the camera, and I would also run all of those simultaneously and do the interview. 

Frank [00:51:53] Yeah.

Chris [00:51:53] I had done that before a little bit. But usually on my team, like, I had done a lot of work with Adam where it was like a two to three person team and I would usually be the sound person. So when Adam and I would go on shoots in like New York City, for example, it was a common setup for him to be on camera. Part of that is because he’s very tall. So if we’re walking around having a tall person with the camera is just helpful, they can move it around a lot. 

Frank [00:52:18] Yeah.

Chris [00:52:18] I’m just like a normal height person, but I have a lot of training in sound recording. So I was a sound recordist back in the 90s because I’m old and I would just carry around two, they’re called shotgun microphones, they’re these long skinny mics, and I would hold them and just get audio and I’d be wearing big isolating headphones and have the sound recorder around my neck so I could, you know, look down and make sure I was working all right. And so I had a lot of experience doing that. And then Adam and I would do these setups where we would both—we kind of moved on and we would do interview setups where each of us would would operate one camera. I would operate the sound and then one or the other of us would be the interviewer. So I’d gotten used to that. But I was I was used to that with Adam. Like that was the person I knew the best. I worked on other projects as well, but that was a setup that I was really comfortable with. Now, Adam during the tournament is busy. He doesn’t have any extra—like he’s not available to come and do that stuff. So the short answer is, I did most of it myself. So a lot of the early work is just literally me in a room by myself. And I’m proud that that worked. Later, like, for example during the actual tournament, I hired Louis Holland and Louis is our Director of Photography. He’s a guy who has worked with Adam and Vince on other projects. He was the Director of Photography on The Palindromists, which is a movie that Vince directed and Adam produced. And I actually shot a little tiny bit of footage for that. That’s a movie that’s out in festivals right now. But it’s it’s now it’s like the third film that has essentially a very similar set of people. So, it’s like Ecstasy of Order and Best of Five and The Palindromists all have some mixture of the same camera people, directors, producers, and editors. Like they’re just it’s kind of like it’s mixed and matched. But it’s just the people who I knew. And so I hired him for a very low wage and rented this unbelievably expensive camera equipment that he—whatever he preferred. I was like, whatever it is, you know how to use best, I’ll go get it. And he was the kind of person who didn’t require a lot of direction. And I had seen it before because I’d seen his work in other projects. And so I just knew, like, OK. And he was very familiar with Ecstasy of Order. And I said, you know, you know what Tetris looks like, do your best. And I hired other other people as well, some of whom did require more direction. Later, the following summer when I had to go and do stuff in L.A., by the way, we also interviewed John Tran, known as Blink, who founded HardDrop when we were there because he was there. We just decided like, let’s go ahead and spend an afternoon learning what his stuff was. When I was there, I hired my friend Carl King, who is now the composer for this new film. And the idea there is Carl King, like me, is like—he came to it from sound initially. Then he got into being a photographer and a filmmaker and he does lighting and he just knows how to do a lot of everything. And so that’s a typical thing for a small documentary crew. And also, he’s an old friend of mine. So I wanted somebody who I just knew and I knew I could say without having to be very gentle, say like, you know, please make this thing happen. And he would just handle it, you know. And he also knew in the same way that if he was having a problem, he could just, you know, raise his hand and say, hey, we’re stopping now. We’re doing this. So I would try to have the smallest possible team. And you look today at documentaries, a lot of times you’ll have like five or six people in a room with multiple cameras that are operated by people. And they’re like, the cameras are moving. And there’s like a whole person for lighting, a whole other person for sound and a whole other person who’s dealing with, like, you know, overall production stuff. And the interviewer. To me, like, that’s neat, I guess. But to me, there’s an intimacy to being a single person, you know, alone, just having a conversation like, yeah, there’s a light on and yeah, there’s a camera. But at some point the fewer people and the less stuff, the easier it is to get an honest answer out of somebody and not to have them feel the pressure of, you know, oh, I’m being in—I’m in a movie. 

Frank [00:56:37] It does make it feel more organic, like it’s a real conversation. And we don’t know that the cameras are here. 

Chris [00:56:46] Yeah. And we obviously haven’t released any footage. Right? So the thing is like the trailer that you see on Kickstarter, it doesn’t—there’s no sound, it’s just like the tournament days. What you’re not seeing it’s literally hundreds of hours of me sitting in like Terry Purcell’s basement. We’re going to Terry Purcell’s, like, school. He’s a school teacher. Or, you know, all these different setups. We’re going to have an interview or like, you know, interviewing, you know, Jonas at his house. Like we interviewed him in a different room than where he streams. But, like, that’s his house. Right. And like, you know. Well, anyway, the point being, there’s a lot of material where people talk about their feelings. They talk about their game, they talk about what it all means to them. And I think that’ll be coming up soon. I’ll probably try to put together, like, by the way, here’s a list of people we interviewed and kind of like a screenshot at least of what those all looked like, because there’s a lot of that. 

Frank [00:57:40] I was thinking about that. How did you contact the players? Because obviously they knew you for being a head referee in 2013, but did they know you were working on Ecstasy of Order? And what was the reaction when you asked them to be on the new documentary? 

Chris [00:57:57] Well, I knew some of them because the thing I probably should’ve mentioned earlier. I wrote an article in 2013, I think, which was titled Playing to Lose, and it was a magazine feature about the CTWC and that article at the time, that article was like ESPN. Like a lot of people read that article and found out about this tournament and came into the scene. And so that was interesting. And because of that, I had contacted Bo Steil and Ben Mullen and interviewed them at great length. And also I’d you know, I’d met them in person at the tournament and I’d, you know, refereed and all that stuff. But because of that, that was one thing I had done. And the fact that I’d been you know, I’d done Ecstasy of Order with Adam, it was very easy for me just to sort of say…like, this is a small world, everybody knew everybody. And so if I just called them up and said, you know, like I know Adam, I know Robin, I know Vince, we’re all friends with the same people. Are you interested in sitting down to talk with me? Everyone said OK. I mean, it was actually incredibly easy to get agreement because I think it was clear that it was such a small group of people who were interested in this hobby to begin with that the idea of being on camera with someone was really unusual. Like we didn’t have we we weren’t on ESPN back then. Like we were just barely streaming on the Internet at all. So I think they were they were keen to be on to talk about it. And by the way, like the number one thing I would say sitting down with a player was, you know, I’m making a film here, but my concept of making a documentary is: I’m here to represent who you are and what you want. I’m not going to turn you into a bad person and I’m not going to mess up your life, you know? And there’s a lot of films that have cast people as villains, especially in, you know, in an attempt to make there be more drama than there really was, and that has really hurt people as people. And I don’t subscribe to that. I’m going to tell the truth, but I’m not going to be a jerk about it. And so I would just be very upfront about that. Sometimes people would say—they would be put off by that because they weren’t expecting that there could be a possibly bad outcome to being in a film. But then they’d say, well, why do you say that? And I’d say, well, in King of Kong, the documentary, I mean, it’s a great documentary. I enjoyed watching it. But the edit was extremely manipulative. It actually did intentionally manipulate the behavior of one of the players to seem that that person was more of a villain than they were. It just straight up lied. It said, you know, this person never showed up to this meeting. Well, he did, actually. And that had turned off people to being in documentaries in general because they saw that, you know, someone couldn’t be trusted to to be accurate. Why would they share the truth? Like, why would they bother to sit down? So I, I tried to say, like listen I’m an honest person. You can see the other work I’ve done and I care about you as a person. And I hope that that’s—I hope that comes across because it’s important to me to be a good person. And it’s important in documentary not to just use people as pawns to make a fun story. So I think that’s why they talk to me, like because I was extremely upfront about that. 

Frank [01:01:18] Yeah. How did you prepare for the interviews? 

Chris [01:01:21] Honestly, a lot of the credit here goes to Adam. Adam Cornelius. We had worked together and I had seen him do his thing. At the time, I had spent the last couple of years working as a writer, writing features. So a feature for, you know, is a profile. You go and you talk to the same person fifteen times and then you assemble a story about, you know, how did their life work. And it’s a little bit different in a documentary. Because in a documentary you’re going to interview Person One and then you’re going to interview Person Two. And those people might end up in a head to head competition later. And so I had asked Adam about this and he gave me kind of the 101 of this. And so for anyone who’s listening, who wants to make their own competition film, what you do is you make a series of questions that you make sure you ask. So, for instance, you say, OK, I’m sitting down with Terry. Terry, tell me about Jonas. Tell me about Harry. Tell me about, you know, like I would ask simple questions, like, you know, when did you start playing Tetris and what does the game mean to you? I had these sort of stock questions, but the most important thing was to make sure I had asked them about specific other people so that when inevitably I had the other person in front of the camera, I could then say, all right, all right Bo. Here’s what Ben said about you. Well, how do you respond? Right? And it’s not, you know, again, it’s not like these are—nobody was mean, but I would ask questions the night before, actually. We did a set of interviews on Friday night where I would say, like, who are you worried about running up into in the bracket? Like who do you not want to play? Or who do you want to play? Meaning, who do you think you can beat? And those answers are great. I’d also say like who do you want to have win the whole thing overall? Like what do you, who do you think deserves it? And a lot of those answers are very revealing and very honest. So you would ask these kind of canned questions, but the other part of it was you had to pay a ton of attention as an interviewer. And this is true of any interview. But you have to pay attention and kind of go off on the tangent with the person. So if they suddenly start going into, like, well, when I was a child, you know, Tetris was my escape. And I you know, there’s a world in which you would hear that answer and say, OK, and then you would ask, you know, question two. In my case, I’m like, tell me more, then they would say, well—

Frank [01:03:48] You would improvise. 

Chris [01:03:48] Yeah. I would just keep trying to get farther and deeper and deeper down that that thing. And eventually you get an answer that’s like, well, you know, as a kid, we moved around a lot. And the one constant I had was my NES and the game I was best at is Tetris and that was the way I could escape into a thing where I felt safe and I felt like I was on my own and I had control over something. And you’re like, aha. Now here we have an emotional reason for why you’re doing something, not that you just want to win or you want to brag or whatever, but you this is a functional thing that’s you’re carrying with you from childhood. That’s why you kind of started here. It’s maybe not why you’re here today. But I loved it to be able to get down to—to spend so much time with someone talking to them that you would get to those those things. And also, by the way, the ability to sit down with someone more than one time, you would inevitably—you’d do an interview and then you’d like, you know, walk away and you’d watch the tape later. And then you’d say, man, I wish I’d asked about this other thing. You’d say, OK. Go back and interview him again. Ask him about the other thing. Or ask him the same question five times and see if the answer ever changes. Right? Just see where you go with that. And I had the luxury of having people who were local to me. I didn’t have to travel to get them and I could just say I’m coming over and they’re like, OK, you know, I brought some beer, you know?

Frank [01:05:08] That’s when you interview the people. Did you write a script afterwards or don’t you write a script at all after until all the footage has shot, or do you work on a basic script? 

Chris [01:05:22] So I, I resisted this a lot. There’s an idea in documentary called “writing the movie” where you write what you think the film will be before you shoot the film. And the concept there is that if you’ve already written out what you think is going to happen, then you’re just sort of like making sure you have the footage to make all those parts work. I actually refused to do that until after I’d interviewed probably 20 people. Because I felt like when I would go in and do a magazine profile about somebody, I wanted them to tell me using their own words, what had happened. And then I was going to say, OK, well, based on that, this is what the truth is, because I felt—I still felt like there was something where I didn’t want to—I didn’t want to be pushing them into my narrative of what I—you know, like I wanted my narrative to come from the truth that I discovered. Which is a very hard way to do it. Like, it’s easier to come in and say the story is about this. So everything you say, I’m going to just steer you back towards this. I didn’t write that script and I still have not written like the majority of that. So Gilbert, the Assistant Director and I, we’re breaking these episodes. We’re planning on five. We might go to my go to six if we got enough money. But we’re trying to make sure that we have all these little story arcs. And so we have essentially like thousands of little note cards that are these little, you know, mini things like these little mini parts of the discussion. And the way I would construct those, I would go back through all the interviews after they happened and clip out the parts that I thought were good and then just write down all of the things that were in that little clip. Like, here’s where the person talks about level 19 maxes. Here’s where they talk about, you know, Jonas. And here’s where they talk about whether everyone is actually emulating Jonas’s game or Harry’s game, and why are those games different and so on. And so from those, I wanted to then derive the story from that. So in that sense, we’re doing something that’s a little bit harder. But we are bringing in for example, we have a narrator, so we can have that kind of—like if we need to fill in the gaps we have, we have a way to fill in gaps later. But I really believe strongly in going in and just being open to what unexpected things are happening. Now having said that, I wasn’t completely unprepared. I would come in with a list of questions. But I was always willing to throw the questions out. Or once I got through my kind of stock stuff, then say, all right, you know, let’s get to something more interesting or what is it that you wanted to tell me about this stuff? And that often would like send us into a whole different direction. So I’m glad I did that. It is a contributor to why this has taken so long to even really begin editing, because we had to, you know, do preparation where we went through and reviewed hundreds of hours of talking and tried to pull out all the themes that were in there because we didn’t force it in to begin with. We didn’t start out by saying this is a movie about this person beating that person. That’s all we care about. We started out by saying this is a movie about Tetris and people who play a difficult game for very little recognition, very little money and very little fame on their own, often like in their basements. A lot of these people are from the working class, like they don’t need to be buying, like a lot of equipment to do this. What does that mean? What does it functionally mean? So that’s what we did. 

Frank [01:08:53] Is that’s the reason why did documentary is still not out? Instead of—it could have been out in late 2015, early 2016, but it will be coming out next year. 

Chris [01:09:06] It’s a reason. I mean, honestly, there’s two big reasons that—there’s two big things that came up. Thing one was. In 2015, I had a trailer and I showed the trailer and some other sample footage at the CTWC, and I think I remember saying, like, if the movie is not done next year, you should all be mad at me. Well, I mean, people can be mad at me. But I thought it was just a matter of like—I thought it was it was just a matter of sitting down and spending more time staring at this footage and putting it together. The bigger problem came in when—this is true, like two things happened. Thing one, I realized I had so much footage that I would have to simplify this thing so radically to fit into the box that I had envisioned, which was a 90 minute long like feature documentary, which is what I’d always just assumed it was, because that’s what Ecstasy of Order is. And that’s what The Palindromists is. And that’s what I thought we were making, like there wasn’t—let’s let’s be very clear, there were not like a lot of successful documentary series in 2014, much less the years prior. So today it’s like, oh, Tiger King comes out or like, oh, The Vow or whatever. Like all these things are—it’s common to have a long multipart documentary series on streaming. Well we didn’t really have streaming, you know, so I hadn’t conceived that that was a possibility. So I was struggling so hard to say, how can I tell a meaningful story in 90 minutes or maybe two hours, like at the most. That was really hard. And I was struggling with it and I was editing and I was just finding myself frustrated and bothered that I wasn’t able to fit more in. That was thing one. Thing two was Trey Harrison came along, joined the team and invented TreyVision, which then allowed him to make HD gameplay. And then the thing that happened right after that was “Boom Tetris for Jeff,” where all of a sudden we had a huge audience on YouTube who all expected every game to be HD. They expected that two-up rendering with the two players on either side. We didn’t—that didn’t exist. That was years away from existing when I shot the film. So what I had in terms of, like video of the games was I had an RCA output going through a USB like recorder that recorded a Flash video file at 320 pixels by 240 pixels of each TV. That’s what I had. 

Frank [01:11:31] Yeah.

Chris [01:11:31] And I had talked to Trey right after he invented TreyVision and said, well gee, can I run this footage through your system? And he gave it a shot and it didn’t work. He was like, I didn’t design it to do this. So it doesn’t work. So, sorry. Right? And the problem was the more popular YouTube got and the more people expected like, this is what Classic Tetris looks like, the more that just putting up to fuzzy standard def things next to each other wasn’t going to cut it, you know. So in my movie, it was going to look terrible because Trey came in and modernized the game by leaps and bounds in the course of essentially one year. And then everything from that on was what got popular. So I guess this sort of second level problem, which was, OK, I don’t have high definition games, I don’t have TreyVision. And I now we have a huge viewer base from YouTube who assume that that’s what everything looks like. So if I come out today after that with a movie where everything’s in standard definition games, it’s going to look stupid, like it’s just not—it’s doesn’t look like the right sport, you know. 

Frank [01:12:42] Yeah.

Chris [01:12:42] So I really struggled with that too. And I you know, I’d go back occasionally to Trey and say, is there anything we can do? And his answer was, you know, honestly, like, it’s a lot of work. I don’t really see a way to get there from here. Well, the thing was, this is the silver lining of the pandemic lockdown. In March, there was this moment where my state locked down and California locked down right at the same time. And I just called him. I texted him, I think, and said, can I call you? He said, sure? I hadn’t talked to him in a long time. And I said, look, I’ve got this problem. You understand the problem. And I’m hoping and just sort of crossing my fingers that maybe you have extra time to give this one last try. Like, is that possible? How much would it cost? And he just sort of thought about it for a while and he said, you know, essentially his work was on hold for like—the day I called him, he said, you know, my current project, you know, that they’re not sure how we’re going to proceed, so I kind of have just been put on on pause for like a day. But it could be as long as maybe four days. I just don’t know, because the virus and there’s all this stuff. So I just don’t know. But I do have a little spare time, and I guess I can look at this one last time. So I was like, well, that’s all I can ask. That’s more than generous. Take a look. And within four or five hours, the first set of matches came back to me in TreyVision. And they had problems. So like he said, look, I ran, I upscaled your video. I ran it through this thing. And the recognizer has problems. And by the way, you see similar problems in what we’ve been watching on the 2020 thing, on MaxOut Club, like there’s the blocks will sparkle, they’ll change colors. Things will move at the wrong rate, like the blocks will disappear randomly because that’s what’s in the source footage. Like the video is not good enough to render everything perfectly. But he’s like, here is a TreyVision copy of this match. Do you want me to do the next match? And I had to just like jump. I was like, oh, oh. Oh, it’s possible. Oh, no, it’s possible. Oh, yes, it’s possible. So I just grabbed all the matches that we needed and like, you know, I had to cut the Flash video files that were hours long and say, like, it’s from this point to that point. And he had to recalibrate TreyVision every single match because every single TV was different and every file was different, and they were all bad in different ways. And he would send me back a file and say, look, I saw errors here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here, that you’ll have to figure out how to fix manually. But! It exists, right? And I was like, wow, OK. 

Frank [01:15:26] How long did it take from the first game to the last game to have all games into TreyVision? 

Chris [01:15:34] I want to say five and a half days, calendar days. It was extremely fast. And he told me midway through it, look. I’m getting rumbles that my day job might be coming back right away, so I want you to make sure that you’re giving these to me in the order that you might need them, because I will probably have to stop before we’re done. 

Frank [01:15:52] Yeah.

Chris [01:15:52] So I didn’t translate every game I had. I translated every match that I could possibly imagine using, like in a narrative sense, which is still like hours and hours and hours of matches right? It’s all of the top eight and it’s a lot of the stuff leading into those top eight brackets. But I put it in order. I was like, okay, obviously the final match is the most important match. And then the things that radiate out from there are the most important things. And then the top eight are the most important things. And then if you have time, these other things. Like they got kind of fun. Like there’s a match where Trey was the 32nd seed and Jonas was the 1st seed, I believe? Anyway, Trey had intentionally gotten himself seeded so he would get he would get to face his friend Jonas in the first round and get destroyed. But when he when he did the TreyVision, he rowby this thing back and he just wrote in all caps like I WAS ROBBED, because now that there was a long bar drought counter, which we never had, right? No one had ever looked at those games! He just got droughted, like he just got terrible RNG. And Jonas was just like having a normal set of games. And so it looked like, well, anyway, the point is like, yes, Jonas is a better Tetris player, let’s not kid ourselves. But it was just really nice that it worked. It worked. The fact that you have statistics live that, you know, this person is actually getting a terrible RNG sequence, makes it so that you can actually say something different about the game. You know the game actually didn’t go that well. And it wasn’t purely because, like, he was just not good at Tetris. He’s great at Tetris. He’s terrific at it. But he had terrible luck and he was playing against Jonas in the first round. So, you know, what’s going to happen is going to happen. But we managed to get games like that, matches like that, as like the last couple of things. But the file that I would get, I had to go through each of those files frame by frame. And when I say frame by frame, I mean I press forward and I you know—

Frank [01:17:57] Oooh.

Chris [01:17:58] Frame by frame. We’re talking hours and hours and hours of footage and watch just with my eyes to see if something in the stack changed colors. 

Frank [01:18:07] Yeah.

Chris [01:18:07] And if it did, I had to go back and paint in, like, find a square and put the correct square where it was for one frame and then it would come back again. I mean it was. You know, don’t cry for me, right, but like wow, it was a lot of cleaning. And so I spent months cleaning these files up. And by the way, the other thing is the film is shot at 24 frames per second, which is different than the game that runs at 60 frames or kind of 30 frames, depending on how you think about it. So Trey had rewritten, as part of this, he had written Trey Vision to output the games at my film frame rate, but still try to have it look normal. So I was editing these games at this very strange time base. So anyways, it’s a whole thing. It’s technical, but the point was all of a sudden two things cleared at the same time. One of them was a realization because my Assistant Director Gilbert called me and said, You do realize that it is 2020 and you can do documentary series now, right? And I was like, um, I had not realized that. And then I, I was like, wait a minute. This actually solves a lot of my problems except for the TreyVision thing. So he was like, why don’t you call Trey? So I called Trey and then Trey fixed it. And you know, and that’s, that’s the story. Like that’s why all of a sudden I was like, oh, OK. So what I need is I need to hire a professional editor and I have to hire a person to do the score. And I can do the majority of the other work myself, but I need a little bit of money to get that to happen. So that’s where the Kickstarter came from. And I ran it, you know, right around the time of the tournament, because I felt like that’s when people would be paying attention to Classic Tetris and we funded in thirteen hours? And now we’re almost a two hundred percent of what we asked for. We could still use more. Because what it means is more episodes, more languages, more, you know, like basically more stuff. But what it does mean is this is going to happen. It is 100 percent happening. You will have to pay for it. And by the way, this is going to be the best deal you’re going to get. So if you you want to get the movie, you’re going to want to go to The TetrisChampion.com, which takes you to Kickstarter and like back it now because, yeah, like next year you’ll be able to buy the series as well. But it’s going to cost more. And also there’s going to be there’s some like special rewards that I don’t think we’ll ever see again. So. Yeah. 

Frank [01:20:44] I was going to talk about the Kickstarter at the end of the show, but we can do it right now. How surprised were you that you were funded within, what was it, 12, 13 hours? 

Chris [01:20:55] Yeah, it was it was like 12 and a half hours. I completely surprised. Completely surprised. That morning. It was a Friday morning, I pressed the button. OK, so let’s back up. It was October, I guess, 30th. So the next day is Halloween, which is the first day of CTWC 2020 online. And then a few days later, is the U.S. election. One of the most like big, all-consuming news events anyone can possibly imagine. 

Frank [01:21:24] Yeah.

Chris [01:21:24] So I needed to start this thing before the election happened and roughly when the tournament happened, because the tournament, like, you know, they were like, I’m sponsoring the tournament. So people will be able to, you know, hear about the Kickstarter so they can come and click on it and put their put their money on it. 

Frank [01:21:42] Yeah.

Chris [01:21:42] I was having a conversation the night before. No, two nights before. With Gilbert. The Assistant Director who, by the way, made this happen by realizing it could be a series, and we we were going to ask for five thousand dollars. Total. And he said, look, if we make this one change to the budget, do you think we could change it to four thousand dollars? And I was like, yeah? and I was like, I’m just not sure we’re going to able to get five thousand dollars, right, or four thousand dollars. I’m not sure we can get four thousand dollars in the middle of a pandemic. In the middle of this, like everybody I know, has given all of their money to trying to stay alive and to support, like, you know, their families. And so it felt very weird to me to be asking for money like at all, but also in the middle of a global pandemic. Come on. You know, it’s just not—didn’t seem like a real smart idea. And so I was really, really convinced that we were going to spend 40 days chipping away like ten dollars at a time to get to maybe the four thousand dollars. 

Frank [01:22:44] Yeah.

Chris [01:22:44] So when 12 hours later, like that night, it was like ding! And I thought…. My goal, I was like, maybe we can get a thousand dollars in a day. Like if we get a thousand dollars in a day, I will be surprised. That’s like my marker. So I did not know how to react. [laughter] I still don’t know how to react because part of it is like, “Wow,” right, is one thing. And also there’s a there’s a thing I’ve seen a lot of—and I’m not saying other people need to do this—but I have been stunned how many people have just been like, you know, here, here’s 20 bucks or 15 bucks or whatever for the series and an extra 50 dollars for nothing. I don’t even want the poster. I don’t want the DVD. Just, just here’s money. Here’s some money. 

Frank [01:23:33] Yeah.

Chris [01:23:33] I—because I want this thing to exist in the world and I, I agree with you that this is a story that, that should be told. And I’m like…. Like it’s an emotional thing for me. The other thing I [sighs], I don’t think this is clear to people, but I’ll go ahead and say it. I have been unemployed since March. I’m on government unemployment. I make I believe it’s a hundred and seventy two dollars per week—. 

Frank [01:24:02] Ooh.

Chris [01:24:02] —from unemployment. I have been working as much as I humanly can from home. I was a portrait photographer. I was—I had shifted my career right before the pandemic to be a photographer. I was I was doing in-person photo shoots and my last shoot was on February 29th of this year. 

Frank [01:24:20] Yeah.

Chris [01:24:20] And then all of a sudden that became completely impossible. And so I was out of I was out of that job. And I it took me a very big shift to be like, OK, how can I do some kind of work, you know, remotely? What it means that this Kickstarter will succeed? What it means is I get off of unemployment. 

Frank [01:24:44] Yeah.

Chris [01:24:45] It also means that we get to have a documentary series. But that is an enormous thing for me and for my family and it is so—that’s part of why it’s hard for me to even understand how to—you know, like when you’re making less than 200 bucks a week and you’re asking for four thousand dollars to make a movie about Tetris. I mean, I like Tetris. And I think Tetris is important and emotionally meaningful, but it’s not as emotionally meaningful as putting food on the table. Like, it just it just felt so strange to me. So I have been, uh, working to process the thing that I need to say, which is just: “Thank you” to the people. Like thank you, like thank you for validating that you actually want this. And at this point, what I want is I just want a larger number of people to give small amounts of money. Like, I don’t you know, if you have money and you want to throw lots of money at it, that’s great. And we do have a good use for it. But at this point, I just want a lot of people to be able to enjoy the thing when it comes out. I want to be able to do live streams when, you know, we release an episode and we have like basically a Zoom party where I get on, you know, Gilbert gets on there. We get some of the champs on there and we just show, we show the thing, and we pause it and just talk about it like, oh, here’s this one shot. Check this out. What’s the story behind that? So that’s that’s, that’s, that’s what’s happening. 

Frank [01:26:11] How did you get Joseph Saelee to be one of the perks that people can can purchase in fact, when they back your Kickstarter? 

Chris [01:26:21] Well, it was about a 10 month effort and a lot of bribes. He has a lot of layers of management. That’s actually not true. So what happened was we were trying to think of, like, OK, what we’ll be a good high-dollar reward. Right? Because it’s a movie. Obviously, the basic reward is you get the movie. Like you get a digital stream or download or whatever, and then if you want more, it’s like, oh, a poster or a Blu-ray or whatever. But then it was like, well, we we know Harry and Jonas. And so what if we had this like 500 dollar US reward where you get all that other stuff you get, like the, you know, the get the movie and everything, but you also get an hour of their time to do whatever. I mean, whatever is legal, you know, legal stuff. And like it can’t be in person unless they agree to it, I guess, because COVID and so forth. But, you know, if you want an experience, it is I don’t think you could contact these people at any time ever and just get an hour of their time one on one for you, you know. And so I floated the idea by Jonas and he said, that sounds cool. I floated the idea by Harry. And he said, that sounds cool. I told them both, I’m only going to do it if you both agree to it because I’m not going to—you know what I I mean? Like, it feels weird. I think it was Harry who said, well, what about Joseph? And I was like, oh yeah, crap. Like I thought about it, but I hadn’t gotten it done. So we launched with Harry and Jonas. Right. So lesson with the champ. You pay 500 bucks and you get to spend some time with the champ. And then Gilbert, who has been in touch with this, is the Assistant Director who has been in touch with Joseph. And I said, so what about Joseph? And he said, well, you know, I’ll just get in touch and see what happens. And so I guess it was it was probably Thursday of last week. So right before the final bracket stuff, he just, you know, sent a—I think it was a Discord message or something—to Joseph and he was like, hey, remember that thing with the lesson with the champ? We like talked about it at some point before? Are you into it? And Joseph said, yeah, sure. And by the way, it’s also important to be clear the way we’re doing it, half the money goes to the champ. So they’re not just like giving me money to do work, because I really believe like if you’re going to do work, you should be paid for the work. 

Frank [01:28:43] Yeah.

Chris [01:28:43] So if anybody buys these things, you know, like after Kickstarter takes their little their little cut of the money, the champ gets paid in a nice way. So it’s a very limited reward. They’re not a lot of these, but it is a thing people can buy. And I’m excited to see what people will do with them because I think, like some people might want to…you might want to do it as a stream, you know, or might want to just talk. I don’t know. Butall three of these people are who they seem, they are all nice, they are generous, and they, if you ask them things that are reasonable, they’ll say yes. I think as long as you have the credibility of saying, like, look, you know, I’m not—I’m not just like a random person, you know, on the Internet. I’m somebody who’s met all of them, you know? And I’ve been standing there with the camera in front of them for years now. So I think it’s easier for me to say, hey, hey, buddy, how about this? And they’re just like, OK, cool. It’s just not even an issue. And I’m grateful to them for that generosity. And I’m also grateful to people who, you know, might choose to back at that level, because at that level when somebody throws 500 bucks into this project, it’s going to mean essentially at some point we’ll get, I hope to get, you know, to the home page of Kickstarter or something. Like the more money, the more attention. And what I what I really want is more people who just want to watch the movie, you know. 

Frank [01:30:11] Yeah.

Chris [01:30:11] But there’s some cool stuff up there. Also, if you would like to be a producer, if you want to be a literal movie producer with a[n] IMDB page and you will have you will share an IMDB credit with me who has an IMDB page and has made Hollywood movies. You can buy that. And you’re not buying the credit. You’re buying joining the team. You get you get on the emails, you get the rough cuts. Like that’s a thing that’s there, too. It costs a lot of money, partly because I just don’t want any random person walking in and joining my team. But, you know, if that’s something that someone has said, listen, I’ve always wanted to know what it’s like to make a movie. Come on in. 

Frank [01:30:50] What did you do that? Why did you what did you offer up a, I believe it’s an Executive Producer, quote unquote, job. Why did you put that on? 

Chris [01:31:00] Well, the first reason was the Executive Producer one, it’s a 4,000 dollar item. And I thought it was a possibility that one person—because, again, I was convinced we weren’t going to raise, I was really worried about getting four thousand dollars. So I thought it was funny in a way to have a button someone could press that just one click and like they fund the whole movie. Because that’s what an Executive Producer is—basically usually a money person. They can also have some creative, you know, relationship. But typically the role of EP is like, I got you the money. So the joke there was you could fund our entire movie, our entire remaining budget for this thing with one click and then that the the AP is like I think is less than that. Associate Producer. Yeah. The point there was I…I think there’s a goal of inclusivity. Right? I want to have more voices in the conversation, but I don’t want to have so many voices in the conversation in terms of editing these episodes and how we put them together and all that sort of stuff. I am open to that. Now, like I’m open to that in the way that like I have chosen my team very carefully. Right. Like I know who’s on it. And this is a way where I’m opening the door and saying, well, anybody who has four thousand dollars can come in and join that team. I do think that there is there’s a thing in Kickstarter where actually you can you actually can refund or kind of like refuse a pledge. So I guess it’s hypothetically possible that if someone who just absolutely wasn’t going to be a good fit came along and tried to offer that money, I’d say no. At the moment, it doesn’t seem likely that that’s going to be a problem. But what I felt like was there are some people in this community who have done extreme things with money, for example, like there was the year of, you know, having to buy an extra flight to get Jani to the qualifiers in time. And that cost a lot of money, right? 

Frank [01:32:54] Yeah.

Chris [01:32:54] But the willingness to do that, just because for for love of Jani, for love of the game, for love of the representation of someone who is not an American getting to actually be there, that that’s important. And if people out there have that kind of money and they want to be in the picture, come on in. Like, you know, like I’m interested in that. And I think that there are people in the community who probably do have that kind of money. Now, granted, I’m not sure this is the—this is a very a weird time to be asking people for money. I buy completely feel that. But if they want to put it down, I’ll make it work and…I’ll also put it this way, like I think that there are some people for whom, like it’s not often that you have any option of getting into the movie industry, you know? So if you’re somebody who’s like, look, I would spend a couple thousand dollars just to, like, get my first credit and be able to talk to the Director and, you know, like have some access and understand, like, how does a documentary movie kind of get made? Like that’s something that would cost me a lot of time and energy to help somebody with. But for yeah, for a couple of thousand dollars, I would do that. And that would be a legitimate way for someone to get exposure to something that they just can’t. You can’t just call someone up, you know, usually and say, can I be involved in your movie project? Unless, you know, like. I don’t know, like it’s never been my experience anyway, so I think this is an unusual opportunity and I don’t feel worried about it. In fact, I would be very keen to see what that relationship would look like. 

Frank [01:34:33] Yeah. I was honestly surprised that you you can’t ask me to be on the show to talk about this. And I looked at the Kickstarter page and you have a perk for yourself that you are I don’t know, it’s a five hundred dollar perk that you will give four hours of your time to someone talk about anything, basically. So I said to my wife, he’s contacting me, I’m making a community podcast. I haven’t done much episodes. And he’s contacting me that he wants to be on the show. And if I saw what the normal person has to pay for you to get four hours of your time. And I got like two hours right now. It’s very cool to see that. 

Chris [01:35:16] Thank you. I mean, at the same time, like, I’m just a person. I’m an unemployed person. Right? But yeah. No, that’s that makes a lot of sense. But I, I have listened to every episode of this podcast, except I haven’t finished the Kingsman episode. I got past about the first third of it and I was like, OK, I’m going to pause this now because I was in the middle of like listening to election coverage. But here’s the thing. Like, I am a big fan of Classic Tetris, right? So when there is anything that happens in Classic Tetris Land, like when CTM kind of started up and really became a big thing and when like—that was one thing I follow as a fan. And so the other thing about it is, you know, Gilbert and I talk a lot about the idea of of representation. Right. So there being actual people who are not Americans who are playing this game, because that’s probably I mean, for all I know, the majority of people are not Americans who are playing this game. 

Frank [01:36:15] Yeah.

Chris [01:36:15] I’m interested and very intrigued by CTEC and the other tournaments out there. Oh, by the way, we have footage that’s going to be in this movie that’s from CTEC. 

Frank [01:36:27] Is it the first CTEC? 

Chris [01:36:29] Yeah, the first one. Because what happened was Terry and I think Adam and Vince kind of went on a vacation and brought their cameras. And so I don’t want to I don’t want to spoil it or whatever. We have great footage from that. And so it’ll be like, you know, at the end of someone’s arc. Right. Like so for example, Terry went to that and he he did well in a particular competition. But in the credits, you know, at the end it’ll be like, you know, and then, you know, Terry went on to become whatever. Right. But like Terry went on to become the champion of, you know, message redacted. But like, you know, he went on to do this thing. I guess my point is I’m like a legitimate fan of this thing. I’m a huge fan of this, which is why I’ve been doing it. I did it for totally free, you know what I mean? Like when when I first joined the CTWC crew in 2012, that was a volunteer job, man. So like, yeah, like I do stuff like I, you know, I make movies and I like, you know, write books and stuff, but I’m still [laughter] like a nerd and a fan. And so when it’s—when it comes to wanting to be on this podcast, I’m like, well this is the podcast about Classic Tetris. Right? And it’s got like Marc on it explaining how many hertz he’s hypertapping at and like how that gets measured, because I am interested in that. I’m like genuinely like, OK, so how does it happen, like are you using, like, you know, which kind of the shooting watch or whatever. Like how does that all work? This is a community that includes people at all kinds of different levels, right? Like people who are—one of our biggest fans, I think in the U.S., one of the most influential fans of our tournament is John Green. John Green wrote Looking for Alaska. He wrote The Fault in Our Stars. He’s a young adult novelist. John Green and I used to work together. I used to write scripts for him for Mental Floss magazine. I met him in college. So we’re basically the same age, we’re basically both from Florida, we’re kind of similar demographic people. He’s a big booster of this, the sport. And he you know, he came into the Kickstarter and just threw a ton of money at it and. And he came in, he was in the Twitch chat being like, by the way, like, I know the Director and he’s like, you know, we used to work together. And I thought, that’s very sweet, right? So John Green, like, by the way, I was I was reffing a fan of his and she had said the reason she got into it was because John had encouraged her to go ahead and try out. Because she’s in she’s a fan of John Green and the Nerdfighters and that whole group. And I had to really hold my tongue and not go into my whole, like, oh, John Green and I used to work together. I was like, okay, let’s see your Nintendo. Like, turn it on, turn it off. Okay, cool. But you know what? When I then emailed John and said, here’s the link. I was like, by the way, like, here’s this player I was just I was just talking to—and I thought you might want to see this because I know you’re off social media, you know, good for you. So, you know, people are people. And like I was also really pleased that somebody did buy that, but they bought one of those, like, you know, Chris Higgins things because like where that comes from is I do a lot of screenings now remotely like that’s what I’ve been able to do while being unemployed. 

Frank [01:39:40] Yeah.

Chris [01:39:40] So, for example, on Thursday, I I’m doing a screening of another film I made for Warby Parker. They’re a glasses company. And I’m just going to be joining them remotely to like do a Q&A after a screening. But like these companies are and, you know, some of it’s companies, it’s educational stuff and whatever. But like that’s a little bit of work I’ve been able to kind of grab around the corners. And I think that’s what people are going to use some of that time for is like, do you want me to talk to your group? Do you want me to do whatever? Anyway, that’s a very long answer just to say, like, I appreciate the thing you’re doing in the world. Like I legitimately listen to your actual podcast or my actual phone, along with all of my other podcasts. And so when I thought, like, OK, so where are the people who care about Tetris, Classic Tetris? Where are they? They’re listening to this show. Right? So my core—if you listening to me talk about this Kickstarter and you can afford the, you know, fifteen dollars U.S. or whatever, I would love it. I think you’re going to get at least that much value out of five episodes, you know, and by the end episodes probably going to be a half hour plus. So we’re talking hours and hours and hours of stuff over the coming year. So I think that’s like—this is where my people are. I just wanted to I wanted to talk to my people, you know. 

Frank [01:40:58] Is that your main target audience, the Tetris players, the insiders? 

Chris [01:41:04] Well, yeah, it’s half and half right. So I think that like the people who watch CTWC and the people who listen to this show and like that’s it’s obvious to me that if you are somebody who’s interested in that stuff, you are almost definitely—like I can’t imagine you wouldn’t like this movie, right? 

Frank [01:41:20] Yeah.

Chris [01:41:20] At the same time, there’s a ton of people who are backing who don’t know anything about Tetris. They’re like fans of other work I’ve done or whatever or they’re fans of somebody else who’s in the movie or whatever. They’re interested in documentaries or they’re…whatever. So I do have to be careful when I talk about the movie to not spoil it for them because they don’t know. They don’t know, you know, like—. 

Frank [01:41:44] What happens! 

Chris [01:41:46] It’s a it’s a tough balance, right? Yeah. So anyway, there are people who don’t want to be spoiled as to like who wins what. Everybody could just grab Google and figure out like what happened in 2014. So there’s a thing where in the trailer I actually blur out a person and I saw in the in the Twitch chat yesterday, somebody was like, why was somebody blurred out? And I so I added as an FAQ and I was like, the reason is because it’s a huge spoiler. Like if you know who that person was in advance then there’s no drama really, like I mean, it’ll still be fairly dramatic. But anyway. I just think that, like, one of the beautiful things about 2014 is that a lot of the matches that you—first of all, no one has seen these matches because the only thing that’s on the Internet is the finals, as far as I know. 

Frank [01:42:32] Yeah.

Chris [01:42:32] So a lot of these matches, you don’t know what happened. You don’t know why. That was an amazing match. Right? So there are several of those where, like, it comes in and you’re like, this is a match for the ages. And yeah, it’s not two 1.1’s, right? Like, we’re in a different era. But the amount of tension is still there because you had a room full of screaming people who were losing their minds because they were seeing what was then the absolute best Tetris gameplay in the world, like they were seeing it live. So those players were pushing each other. And I just I just love that. And I know that the people who love that, too, are watching the tournament and they’re listening to this and they’re in all the Discords. I think there’s like a lot of discussion about, you know, tapping versus DAS versus all this stuff. And that’s fine. Like, I currently don’t take a position on that. But I think one thing that Chris Tang said yesterday, I think, in his commentary, it was an interesting note. And by the way, Chris Tang and James Chen are going to be doing brand new commentary, even though Chris Tang already commentated these matches live. We’re going to have them do it over again. 

Frank [01:43:37] Are they going to do it when they saw the match beforehand and then take notes of things they need to focus on? Are, are they going to do it quote unquote, a live style? So, commentate what they see? 

Chris [01:43:50] I’m trying to do the latter, so I’m trying to surprise them. The goal is we’re going to try to get them into studios. And this is a very challenging thing. But Gilbert and I are working out a way to get them into a safe, like studio environment where they can actually… art of the thing about being a commentator is that you’re physically next to that person. And also part of it as an audience. I don’t think we can safely do an audience right now. 

Frank [01:44:11] Yeah.

Chris [01:44:12] But I mean, those those two men have been next to each other for a lot of Tetris. And so if there’s a way to do it safely, we’re going to try to do that. But what are we going to do? It’s Gilbert and I get the matches ready. We get the the video that’s that’s important for them to see. So they may even have like four or five different angles that they can see because we had we had between six and 10 cameras rolling all day that Sunday. So we have GoPros that are showing the players. We have the game, we have the audience, we have all this stuff. And so we even have the audience reaction. And we even could be playing Chris Tang, his own commentary back. But that would be probably annoying and confusing. But I want them to be surprised. So the goal right now—this is this is my proposed procedure, we might change this, but the idea is we’re going to basically prep them a little bit. So we’re can say, OK, look, you’re looking at a match. It’s here in the bracket. We will have blanked out the remainder of the bracket. So it’s this person versus this person. And so to get here, this player had to defeat this other player to get here, right, and also here’s all the background material you need to know. So it’s 2014, right? We’re not going to have them pretend that they’re talking in 2014. We’re going to say, like leading up into this, these people had faced each other in tournament play. And this is this is what happened. So here’s the here’s the rivalry that you’re looking at. And then have them just look at what they’re seeing and react to it. And then we’re probably going to run it through a second time. So that we’ll do it all the way through, just live, and then record that. And my thinking is we might then do it a second time so that theoretically, if they see a second thing, you might be able to like, kind of splice those things together. I haven’t fully decided if that’s the way to do it. But I want an honest reaction because, you know, James Chen has never seen the games. And Chris Tang has but it’s been a really long time. So to have them now have the ability in TreyVision to see the droughts and stuff. And by the way, we’re never doing a four-up layout. We’re only doing two-ups. So they’ll always be able to say, like, we’re focused entirely on these two games. That should help. But by the way, one quick note is that yesterday I heard Chris Tang say something like, you know, we’re seeing these these very high scores, these like these players pushing each other. He said, you know, what we’re seeing today is the players are pushing each other and that’s what’s causing the level of play to elevate so high. So we’re getting, you know, these these dueling one point ones and stuff. 

Frank [01:46:38] Yeah. Nuts. 

Chris [01:46:39] And he also said and that’s that’s what’s different today. And I agree with him. But I also disagree. Because what you’ll see in 2014, what you’ll see in this movie is the exact same thing was happening. People were pushing each other. People were actively pushing each other. The difference was scale. The number of people who were who were there to be pushed. 

Frank [01:47:02] Yeah.

Chris [01:47:02] There were only like 40, 50 people in the universe of Tetris. There were only a few dozen max-out players, you know. So what you were seeing was this this thing of Jonas and Harry were essentially providing examples. And Thor, you know, like these these players who are providing examples and were pushing the rest of the field. You saw that exact same kind of behavior happening. The difference is now the universe of Tetris is like thousands of people. I don’t know how many max out we have now, but it’s it’s definitely more than a hundred. 

Frank [01:47:40] 200, 220, I think? I don’t know for sure. 

Chris [01:47:44] And we I mean, there was even a part in this movie and I’m not going to spoil it, but there’s a big hilarious argument in my kitchen after the Sunday night where some players are arguing about whether it’s possible for a random new player. Like, let’s say here’s the gambit. Let’s say you could get a million dollars. A random person off the street. If somebody was providing a million dollar prize. Bill Gates just giving out a million dollars to anybody who can pick up NES Tetris and max it out in one calendar year. How many people, what is the percentage of the population who would attempt that would actually get the million dollars? That was the question in 2014. 

Frank [01:48:28] Yeah.

Chris [01:48:28] What’s fascinating is the people who had already maxed out said, you know, most of them, it’s like people. And I think Ben Mullen said something like, if they have two thumbs, they’re going to they’re going to get it, right? Because a million dollars is a million dollars. It’s like, there’s nothing special. The people in that room who had not maxed out had a very different opinion. They were like, we think there is something intrinsically difficult. The ability to max-out is so difficult that it just cannot be done except by these extremely specialized people. And what’s been proved lately is, oh, you can max-out. If you want to max-out, you can max-out. It’s going to happen. But we didn’t know that was possible because we didn’t have streaming and we didn’t have game footage. People were recording these games on their VCRs if they were lucky, you know, like it was a different era. So. I am so pleased to see that the pushing now is we’re pushing past boundaries that were impossible. 29 play was you know, we had hypertapping a little. But like, this is even pre Koryan and this is right before Koryan enters the scene and it’s a beautiful thing. 

Frank [01:49:41] What do you want us to see? What the scene was back in 2014? Or do you want to implement the knowledge that we have today? Do you want to add that to the film? 

Chris [01:49:56] That’s a really good question that I haven’t fully resolved. So this is a writing problem that I have with Gilbert, where it’s like, how do we deal with the present versus the past? I think that probably the best way to present the film is from the perspective of, you know, 2014 and leading up to it. However, there will be voices like the commentary, you know, that are happening in 2021 or whatever, like whenever we record that, which is soon. There’s no way to pretend that the future never happened, right? but I think that for it to be an exciting film to watch, you probably need to take it from where it is. So it’s like if let’s say you made a movie about, you know, football clubs playing in 1965, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to be like saying, you know, just to start in 2010 and say, OK, well this is where this club ended up. It would make more sense to say, OK, well in 1960 here’s where they were. And then five years later we’re going to see how they’re doing. We have to situate them in time, I think. 

Frank [01:50:56] Yeah.

Chris [01:50:56] We also can’t ignore that things later happened. But I think the way I’m going to do it is if you didn’t know, like, if you’re not a Tetris, you know, if you’re not already deep in the Tetris world, it should make sense to you. There should be nothing this movie that’s like not, you know, understandable. So a normal average person could watch this movie and learn about the Tetris and figure it out. And that’s fine. If you are somebody who has seen what happened later, you’re going to see a lot of echoes. You’re going to be like, oh, I see. And then this leads to this. Which leads to this, which. Hmm. Right. Kind of like when you watch Ecstasy of Order and you see Thor and you’re like, boy, this hypertapping thing seems like a thing, right? You know, like how come more people aren’t trying this? There’s a little bit of that, that echoing. But that’s that’s one of the biggest challenges, honestly, in the edit, in the next stage of this. I don’t want to shoot new material because I don’t think we have to, but I am writing new narration, right? Part of it is a lot of the players, I think maybe all of the players that I’m featuring are still playing. You know, they’re not in that top eight bracket in 2020. But like, they go on to do things. Like, by the way, Jeff Moore is also in this movie. And so like, you know, like a lot of the a lot of the players that you see today have been there. It’s not so long ago that they’re not they’re not the same folks, but the people who are winning like especially this year, it’s a different group, you know. And so and I want to celebrate that. But that’s a different movie to celebrate in. Like this movie is about the people that we actually have on camera from back then. But there’s a lot that they say that points toward the future. And there’s a point where Terry says, look at Jonas. There’s like no gameplay footage of Jonas on the Internet. Like I have found and downloaded every game and there’s only six of them. And you’re like, Jonas? There’s not enough gameplay of Jonas on the Internet? Like in 2020 jonas plays every day on the Internet. That’s his job! So like it’s a fascinating difference just in how like Twitch and all those things changed the scene and change of the game and made it possible for people to understand how to do it. 

Frank [01:53:08] Who’s currently working on on the movie? 

Chris [01:53:12] Currently it is me, Gilbert Tang and we have an editor named Ryan Douglass. He is doing the kind of mechanical parts of, you know, going through and putting sequences together. He actually edited that two minute like, you know, fast cutting—the thing we keep playing at the tournament. But mostly right now, because the money didn’t come in yet, it’s mostly me. So we do have some early scoring work going on. Carl King wrote all the music that’s that you’ve heard so far in these videos and he’s been doing some score work to get ahead of it. And I’ve just paid him early for that, you know, things I can. But at this point, like part of it is like we go through and Gilbert and I figured out how do we want to break out the episodes, like what happens in episode one, what happens at the end of the episode five or whatever? If we make more money, do we do we push it to six episodes? And if so, what is the extra episode? Is it just like is it some fun side thing or is it just more? 

Frank [01:54:15] Or how the scene is right now? 

Chris [01:54:18] Yeah, exactly. Is there a way to say, well, look, because that won’t come out until last, do we…? Like, there’s a lot of a dance here about…like we are promising the first episode for April of 2021, and my thing is I want to promise something and then I want to beat the promise. So like April, like you, you’re going to get an episode in April, you’re probably going to an episode sooner than April. But then like if we have five episodes, I have made no statement about whether you got them in May, June and July. Like how long does it take for each other episode, right? Yeah. So that’s that is a question like we don’t know what the world will look like by April, and I don’t know whether it will be meaningful for me to be able to shoot more material. So if I have extra budget and I have a story to tell, then maybe there is a reason to go ahead and do a sixth episode that focuses on something that’s newer or more interesting, you know, if it’s safe. And maybe it will be like that will be at the time it comes up. Right. So we’re keeping those options open because, I mean, why not. Like but at this point, that’s also part of why going past the initial budget actually is meaningful. Because if we end up at, you know, ten thousand dollars, we will have a good budget to do a really solid five episodes with, like, great original score and great design. It’ll be terrific, right. If we get fifty thousand dollars, which I don’t think we will, but if we do, uh, we’ve gotta think about that. We’ve got to stand back and be like, oh OK, what do we do now. Like what do we do with this extra stuff. Because we’re not talking, just going to take that money and just, you know, take a vacation. I’m going to put that on screen. And so. I don’t know. So given that we still have like a month essentially in funding left, I am very curious. And you may have noticed the Kickstarter actually ends after the finals. Several days after the 2020 finals. 

Frank [01:56:19] Yeah.

Chris [01:56:19] Because if we get another champ and if they agree to do it, I would love to offer a lesson with that champ, too. 

Frank [01:56:26] Well that would be amazing. 

Chris [01:56:28] Who knows? Like there’s a lot of folks in that…there’s seven folks in that bracket who are not Joseph, right? So you never know and want to be ready for stuff like that. I am grateful to be doing this and I’m grateful that there are so many options as well. And so part of saying like, look, please back my Kickstarter is you’re going to get to see as we hash it out, as we figure out what is the strategy here, that we have the broad strategy, but then there’s a lot of specific, like tactical decisions to be made. 

Frank [01:57:04] Yes.

Chris [01:57:04] And that’s what you get if you’re a backer. You get the like the behind the scenes, especially if you get the director commentary streams where we’re going to be just very honest. Like like, look, I’m going to open the project, the Premiere project on my computer, and we’re just going to start clicking around like, do you want to see some cool scenes? Check this out, you know, or whatever. Like I’m all about outtakes and bloopers and all that stuff. So when I by the way, when I say five episodes, there probably will be special features, which I don’t include in that. And so I don’t know how I’m going to do that. But they’ll just—they will exist somehow and you’ll get them. But there’s a lot of side stuff in here, like, for example, we have like I think it’s 90 minutes of talking with John Tran about guideline Tetris, which has nothing to do with CTWC. But it’s a nice interview. It’s a great interview. And like we could probably get to John and talk to him more today, six years later, if we wanted to. If we wanted to make a whole, like, sort of sub side feature about how has guideline Tetris, you know, how is that scene worked lately? 

Frank [01:58:06] Yeah. What are the distribution plans for the movie. Is it going straight to DVD or are we going to see it on a streaming site or do you want it to be on TV some some day? 

Chris [01:58:23] So I come from a background where it’s important to own the creative work that you make. Right? Like when I was in bands, we were never signed on labels. We made records at our house and sold them. Right? And in movies, sometimes you have to make big compromises, like in movies, if you have a movie with a budget of like, you know, five hundred thousand dollars and you don’t have five hundred thousand dollars, you make a compromise. Somebody gives you the money, you make the movie. But now you have to do what they say, right? 

Frank [01:58:50] Yes.

Chris [01:58:50] This is not that! I have spent at least twenty thousand dollars of my own money making this movie so far, and I will spend more. But, you know, the Kickstarter will help with that. What I mean is I’ve never borrowed money or taken investors. So I have every option in how I want to distribute the movie. My bias as a punk rock teen or whatever is to distribute it in the punk rock style to say, OK, it’s going to be on the Internet in a—like, you’ll have to have a password or whatever. But I’ll make it easy, you know, and you’re going to go to a place and you can stream it there and you can probably download an MP4 and even if technically you’re not supposed to like, I’m pretty sure you’ll figure out a way. I don’t care. Like, that’s the intent. The intent right now is to provide a, use a streaming service called Vimeo on Demand, which enables, you know, you go there, you get a code, I will email everybody a code and those are special to each person and they’ll go and make an account and then they download and stream and whatever. Have fun. Now, that doesn’t close down the the options of other things. So although no one has contacted me and said, hey, I’m from, you know, Netflix or Amazon or whatever, and I would like to carry this, it’s possible. One of the things is also a challenge is that a lot of the footage for this thing was shot when 1080p was the standard. So it’s about it’s about like three quarters 1080p and a little bit of 4K. And right now, the only content that you ever see coming, that’s like new content that has 1080 stuff in it, is documentary on streaming services. But they have standards that are like if you’re shooting a new movie today, you have to give us like the maximum resolution. So that’s a challenge. And that’s a technical thing where some streaming services will look at this and say, well, if it’s not in 4K HDR, I don’t want it because it’s not technically interesting to me. 

Frank [02:00:42] Mm-hmm.

Chris [02:00:42] But if we have a lot of people who are interested in this movie and think it’s cool, I think it could be distributed by somebody bigger. My—to answer your actual question—what I want is for the a lot of people to see this movie. And I will do what it takes for that to happen. But my responsibility is to my backers, the people who put down the money and said, I want the movie to get made. You’re going to get the movie. Now if somebody comes along and says, like, hi, I’m from, you know, some giant corporation and I want to take the movie and like, you know, shut this down or whatever, you know, like, thank you. But no. If it’s an add-on, if they’re like, look, we’ll let you distribute this to all your people and then we’ll go ahead and show it on our service later. That’d be great. And if you happen to work at a large streaming service and you’d like to contact me, I go to Chris Higgins dot com and go to the contact form. You know, like I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think that this is a fairly special purpose thing. So I think I think what’ll happen is I’ll sell it on Kickstarter. People will buy it. After Kickstarter, when we have episodes up, I’ll have a little way where you can go and buy it. Then, you know, you can go and go with it, basically, you know purchase the series after it actually exists or maybe during it being released. 

Frank [02:01:56] Yes.

Chris [02:01:56] But and, you know, I would love it both financially and for the audience if there were some way to get a much bigger audience. And I have constructed the project explicitly so that is possible. I have nobody who owns anything. And every contract is written so that I can distribute it because I thought I was! I thought I was going to make a 90 minute movie that’s going to be in theaters like and I’d have to go through a distribution company. So it’s possible. I don’t think it’s likely, but it’s possible, I guess. 

Frank [02:02:29] Yeah. My final question is, why do we need to back the Kickstarter? And if we don’t have the money right now, why should we buy the movie next year? 

Chris [02:02:39] If you are in a position…someone listening to this, if you’re in a position where spending 15 or 20 dollars US is difficult for you, but you might be able to come up with it later, like next year, you should wait. You know, if it’s going to be a if it’s a problem for you financially, you should wait. Because the money will still be here. The movie will happen. Like that has now been demonstrated by everybody else. The thing that you will miss out on and I’m sorry you’ll miss out on it, but you will is the updates along the way. You’ll miss out on the director’s commentary streams. And those are going to be I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but CGP Grey does these things where when he makes a video on YouTube, he does another stream where he basically just opens like his editing app and shows you, you know, plays 30 seconds of it, then stops it and says, OK, OK, this shot right here, check out this. Let me tell you the back story. Then goes into this whole tangent, you know, and shows you shots that he didn’t use and all this other stuff. Those are going to be a lot of fun because we’re going to have a big we’re going to able to bring in guests, you know, like I have this whole Zoom thing set up. That thing is a five dollar add-on. I think it’s extremely worth it if you’re into that kind of thing. And I don’t know how to sell it late is the other thing. Like I don’t know how to sell that thing. Like the you know, how do you buy a ticket to a stream? Like, maybe I can do it. But that the reason to do it now would be to be able to follow along and to hear us. And and we’re not going to, like, bug you every—we’re going to say every week, like, here’s a bunch of stuff we’re struggling with! Like we’re going to say this is this is what’s happening. Or for example, like, do you want to see behind the scenes pictures of, you know, what is the setup for when we do the the recording of the new commentary? Like, what does it look like. 

Frank [02:04:24] Yeah.

Chris [02:04:24] And what is the video that those commentators are looking at so we can give them the best possible view to simulate being in the tournament hall?. You’re not gonna be able to get this. It’s not going to be possible if you’re not getting those Kickstarter updates. So that’s the thing to get. At the same time, I want to be very clear. Like, I don’t want to pressure anybody into doing something that is financially difficult for them because that’s not right. So I understand we’re living in an unusual time. And I don’t I don’t think anyone should feel bad if it’s a problem for them. And I will be here to, you know, give you a great movie when you can. So, you know, I would love to have the money now and I think would be more fun for you now and over the coming year. But also, you know, you’re going to be OK. There’s going to be Tetris regardless of whether you can chip in the money today or not. 

Frank [02:05:26] Where do we need to go to back the Kickstarter?

Chris [02:05:29] We have a special URL set up. If you go to TetrisChampion.com, that will redirect you to Kickstarter slash blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. I’m pretty sure if you go to Kickstarter and just search for like Tetris or Best of Five, which is the—it’s called Best of Five: The Tetris Champions Tetris? Yes, The Tetris Champions. [laughter] We we had a whole discussion about the titling very recently. You’ll be able to find it pretty easily, but just hitting TetrisChampion.com is the easiest way to get to there. And when you get there, there’s a big video, there’s a whole bunch of writing there about like, what is this? Who is the team? Photos of people who are working on it and stuff like that. And a bunch of rewards, like there’s other stuff we haven’t talked about and go read about those. One thing I do want to briefly mention, Kickstarter has a beta feature called add-ons, and this is very new. Like this came out, I think, in the past month or two. And so we had to apply for a special beta program to get it. And what it is, is like in the old days when you backed a Kickstarter, you had to be like—you to construct the tiers. So it was like poster, Blu-ray, Blu-ray plus poster, you know, book plus Blu-ray plus poster plus, you know, like you had to make these terribly confusing things. Without add-ons, you pick the thing you want, even if it’s like the cheap thing. And then in the checkout process, they’re like, would you also like a poster or a Blu-ray or two or whatever? And we discount those things like by 25 bucks when you get to that point because you’ve already bought the movie. So, just one thing to note, because it’s just new. So if you’ve backed Kickstarters before, you know, you might not know that that’s going to happen. It’s also confusing because when we add new rewards, they go to the bottom of the add-ons. So if you go and edit your pledge, you’re like, I’m not sure I’m seeing the thing I want. Well, I get hit next and then and then scroll down and they’ll get there. So it’s a new thing. It’s a little bit, not buggy, but it’s just like not fully baked, but it will work. And it’s another way to to say if you’re somebody who, like, really just wants the Blu-ray or whatever, like you can do that. Or if you want that unusual combination, you know, like you can really build your own. And that used to have to go to a third party company. So I’m glad we don’t have to do that because again, we’re running this pretty cheap. It’s you know, it’s me. 

Frank [02:07:58] Chris, I thank you very much for your time. It was a pleasure to talk about anything about the documentary and about CTWC. 

Chris [02:08:05] Well, thank you, Frank. I really appreciate, you know, or should I call you SirMaser? I think what you’re doing here is important. I’m surprised it’s taken this long for a Classic Tetris podcast to pop up. But this is this is a great place to be. And it’s my privilege to join you and to speak to your listeners. 

Frank [02:08:24] Thank you. Thank you very much. 

Chris [02:08:25] Thanks.

Frank [02:08:29] And with that all being said. This will be the end of the Piece Dependency Podcast. Thank you all for listening and make sure to follow the podcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Don’t forget to join the Kingsman Tetris Friendly Discord server and follow me on the socials @SirMaser. Don’t forget to help Chris Higgins with his Kickstarter. Go to TetrisChampion.com and join the fun. For now, have a great Tetris time and I will see you all in December. Bye!

Through interviews with industry experts and people with disabilities, I learned what accessibility really means. As one of my subjects stated in an interview, I now believe that accessibility is a human right. That’s a big statement—it implies a lot when you make things (as I do) for consumption by people around the world. Effectively, my mission is no longer just to “make great work,” it is also to make that work accessible to everyone. If I write an article, I want that article to be accessible to people with any kind of disability. That’s relatively easy, as my articles are primarily just words, and words are extremely accessible when presented properly (yay, computers). But when I make films, things get a bit more interesting: How do we turn a visual medium into something that’s accessible for people who can’t see it, or hear it? The short answer is, you try to understand the needs of your audience, you ask for help, and you do your best to build in accessibility best practices from the start.

The History of this Documentary

In 2015, I was approached by Lucid Meetings to make a short film about the work they had done to make their online collaboration tools accessible. I actually worked at Lucid some years back (and had written for their blog recently), so this was less of a client/filmmaker commission than a collaboration among friends. In any case, after the first interview I shot for the film, it became obvious that the story was far less about the specific work Lucid had done on their product, and more about accessibility as a larger concept.

Initially entitled #a11y (after the numeronym for “accessibility”), I screened a work-in-progress version of the film at the Accessing Higher Ground conference in November 2015. The audience there gave me crucial feedback, which I can sum up with two points:

1. I had managed to make a film by, for, and about usability professionals. Because of this, there was a fair amount of jargon in the interviews. While the usability professionals appreciated the film, they suggested that a more valuable product would be something simpler that introduced accessibility to everybody else. In other words, if I’m making a film, the most valuable thing I can do is raise the consciousness of people who don’t know a whole lot about accessibility, rather than get into the weeds of the technical standards.
2. The first cut of the film failed to depict people with disabilities actually doing things. This was a case of showing people talking about a subject, but not actually showing the subject itself. It was clear that I needed to show specific use cases—in other words, someone with a disability doing something—in order to make the point.

Given this feedback, I put the existing footage on the back burner for the moment. I met Cory Klatik at a local accessibility meetup, and we began shooting interviews in early 2016. After several rounds of interviews and adventures around the city, I’m working on a new cut of the film that is specifically focused on Cory’s experience with accessible technology.

What’s Next?

I’m lining up a series of screenings for 2016. There will be at least one work-in-progress screening mid-year in Portland, Oregon, with Cory in attendance for Q&A. I’m shooting for a premiere in the fall, then the film will be online for all to access. The finished product will have audio description, full closed captions/subtitles, a transcript, and various options for access (for example, the ability to download the film and watch it offline, or read the transcript instead, etc.).

If you have any comments, questions, or feedback, please contact me.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Is this an ad for Lucid Meetings? No. Lucid provided funding for the film, and I’m going to acknowledge that in the credits, but in the current cut there is actually no mention of the company or its products. To be frank, the folks at Lucid appear to be just as excited about spreading the good news about accessibility as I am.
2. I saw a trailer for #a11y…is this the same movie? Yes and no. I made a trailer for the version of the film showed at Accessing Higher Ground, and the folks at AccessibilityOz hosted that trailer, showing off their accessible online video player. (It’s great!) I plan to re-title the film, and this is the same project, but the content has changed substantially since that first cut.
3. How long will it be? I’m not sure, but I’m shooting for 10 minutes. While I have dozens of hours of footage, I think this thing needs to be bite-sized so that a broad audience can easily commit to watching it.
4. How much will it cost? Nothing. The movie will be free. The whole point of this exercise is to distribute this as widely as possible, and the only way to achieve that is to make it free.

2013 was a huge year for me, both personally and professionally. Here are some quantifiable reasons why:

5 Features Written for The Magazine – Starting on January 3, 2013, I wrote a series of five reported stories for The Magazine, and I’m immensely proud of that work. I have done magazine work before, but this is the year I cranked into gear. Stay tuned for 2014, as there’s way more where that came from. (Funny — the day I posted this review, a sixth feature was published. But that goes in the 2014 bucket.)

44 Hours of Interview Audio Recorded – Oy, this makes me tired just typing it.

2 Books Published: The Blogger Abides (by me), and Breakfast on Mars (with 36 other nice authors). Long story short, I wrote a book about writing, and people seem to like it. I contributed the title essay (and a second essay) to a book for kids about writing essays, and people seem to like it.

304 Blog Posts Written for mental_floss – It actually might be more, but this is what I had listed in my notes. I’ve been writing a daily column for the lovely folks at mental_floss since 2007. Pretty soon I’ll get my wings.

2 Speaking Gigs – UC Davis, talking about The Blogger Abides; and Ziba Design, talking about the Monkey Puzzle Trees of Portland (you kinda had to be there).

1 Book Signing – San Francisco, signing Breakfast on Mars at The Booksmith. It was a fun event, and proves my motto: always bring your own Sharpie. (I recommend the silver ones, they stand out nicely.) Still haven’t made a print version of the other book, so no signing parties there.

1 Tetris Tournament Refereed – I was Head Referee at this year’s Classic Tetris World Championship, which is where that photo above comes from (taken during the tense final match). The difference between Head Ref and Regular Ref (the latter is what I did in 2012 and led to this article) is mostly a matter of perspective.

2 Reporting Trips – I traveled to Seattle and San Francisco to report on stories. It’s a privilege to be able to go and see people where they work, and stay with friends while you do it. Thank you, Sabrina and Connor!

18 Articles Written for Pearson – I’m not sure if these are published yet, or if they’ll have my name on them. In any case, I wrote a nice set of articles for kids. I’m probably contractually obligated not to say much more, aside from it being some of the best totally reading-level-appropriate material your kid’s gonna read next year. (Ahem.)

12,828 Photos Taken – Uh, I took too many pictures this year. A few thousand of those were for the Trek in the Park feature for The Magazine. My big take-away: the Nikon D7100 is a dramatically better camera than my old D7000. “Old.” Hah!

409 flower bulbs planted – And I still have a few dozen waiting in the crawlspace. I’ve been busy.

11 African Violets Propagated – Including two vigorous clones from an Optimara “space violet” I bought the day I moved to Portland, nearly fourteen years ago. I got it at a New Seasons or a Whole Foods, I can’t remember which. In any case, cloning is totally a thing!

1 Tweeter Replaced – It took me years, but I finally found a working replacement tweeter for my Bowers & Wilkins DM603 speaker. This is a big deal if you’re a dork like me with a blown tweeter.

1 Day Job Quit – I’m proud of the work I’ve done in technology, and immensely grateful to the friends who have worked with me on it. But the truth is my heart is less in software and more in words lately, so I had to hang up my software-writing hat in 2013.

1 Wedding & 9 Wedding Receptions – Rochelle and I were married this year, and that’s really the biggest headline here. She supported me in doing all the stuff above, and I quite literally could not have done it without her — she is my first reader and informal editor on everything that goes to print. After our wedding, we hosted nine tiny receptions at our house through the summer and fall. Pro tip: people love a garden party…but only when it’s above 60 degrees outside. I would offer you another pro tip about whom to marry, but she’s taken.

Reading through this list, it seems like both a lot and a little — part of me aches that I didn’t do more (I think I could have, if I had tried harder), though the larger part sits back and says, “That’ll do, pig.”

I have plenty of work ahead of me, but I’m going to take the evening off. Please send me your year-end list, and take a moment to be proud of your achievements. Then — back to work!

1. The Magazine Is Good for Writers

I’m a working writer. I write articles, I get paid for them, I pay the mortgage with that money. The Magazine has extremely reasonable and writer-friendly contract terms. The typical contract you sign as a writer is like, “MegaGlobalCorp owns your ass, and you’ll be lucky to receive $0.50 for your work. You promise to give back the $0.50 if MegaGlobalCorp ever gets angry. Do not taunt MegaGlobalCorp.”

The contract offered by The Magazine is a shining model of reason, simplicity, and fairness. I’d summarize it: “You own your ass. The Magazine would like to pay you well to run a product of said ass on a limited basis. Oh, and we pay photographers and illustrators too.” It’s like signing a contract with a puppy, using a unicorn horn as a pen. An actual for-profit publication runs like this. That matters, folks.

Oh yeah, and despite not having any contractual obligation to do so, The Magazine will pay writers, photographers, and illustrators to re-run our work in this book. Why? Because The Magazine is good to its contributors and recognizes that we’re all in this together.

2. The Magazine Is Good for Readers

You can read The Magazine on your Kindle (I do!). Or on their website (also mobile-optimized). Or your iPad, using a beautiful native app. Or your iPhone. It costs TWO BUCKS to access EVERY BACK ISSUE EVER for a month (or $20 a year). It’s published every two weeks. Every issue includes a free article in case you don’t subscribe. There are no advertisements. Show me another magazine of this quality with this level of generosity to its readers. (By the way, the Kickstarter offers discounted $15/year subscriptions…you should get one. I hear they make great gifts, too.)

Oh yeah, and you can download all the back issues in .mobi (Kindle) or .epub (other e-reader) formats and keep them forever, even if you cancel your subscription. And Glenn Fleishman, the editor, even tells people this on Twitter — it’s not a sneaky thing, it’s just how this magazine works. To quote the Bluth family, “COME ON!”

3. I Write for The Magazine a Lot

I ran the numbers in May to figure out who writes for The Magazine. I ran them again in August, just before a few more of my articles were published. I have put serious effort into becoming a frequent contributor, and I want that to count. I’ve already been paid well for my efforts, and recognized by readers (that’s especially nice — thanks, y’all), but I have an interest in the ongoing health of this publication. I want to keep writing for it, and I want more people to say, “Oh yeah, I love The Magazine!” When I began writing for mental_floss in 2006, I got blank stares when I mentioned the name. Now, I get a ton of “Oh yeah, I love mental_floss!” That only happens when the publication puts out great stuff consistently, and readers pay for it.

Long story short: the more The Magazine succeeds, the more my early choice to bet on this horse pays off (metaphorically, anyway).

4. The Magazine is an Honest Experiment

When Marco Arment started this thing, he dubbed it an experiment, and Glenn Fleishman (its longtime editor and now also owner) has continued that tradition. Glenn has branched out into running some Magazine work on Medium, and I wrote a little item on The Unipiper for that. There’s a podcast in the works. Now Glenn is dipping his toe into print. While I have no inside information, I suspect that if The Magazine succeeds with this first book, we can expect future annual books as well.

I would be very pleased if someday The Magazine had a regularly-scheduled print component (even if it’s quarterly — in fact, perhaps it’d be best as a quarterly), so it can reach people who prefer to read on paper. But because this is an experiment, we’ll just have to see what happens. If people decide that print is worth it, great. If they don’t, that’s a bummer, but it’s an important data point.

5. The Magazine Would Never Publish a Listicle Like This

In my book about writing, I decry the listicle format as the dumbening of online writing. For professional reasons, I am often called upon to write lists, and have made my peace with that. But you know what? The Magazine is not dumb. It does not run dumb lists. It does not stoop to click-bait headlines. It does not have ads. Let us celebrate a thing that is not dumb.

In Summary

The Magazine is a wonderful publication. You can read all about the Kickstarter campaign, and I urge you to chip in. As I write this, there are still some “early bird” $30 print book/ebook combo packs available. The campaign is in its final three days, and still needs your support — the dollar goal has not yet been achieved. If you support me as a writer, please buy this book.

So why did I care? Mainly because I wanted to be near the top of that list, and I was. But since that analysis in May, things have changed quite a bit.

Top Contributors (By Number of Articles)

As of August 20, 2013:

1. Lex Friedman, 6
2. Alison Hallett, 4
3. Chris Stokel-Walker, 4
4. Glenn Fleishman, 3
5. Chris Higgins, 3
6. Eli Sanders, 3 (in one issue)
7. Jason Snell, 2
8. Daniel Rutter, 2
9. Marco Arment, 2
10. Dan Moren, 2
11. John Moltz, 2
12. Serenity Caldwell, 2
13. Mark Harris, 2
14. Chris Breen, 2
15. Marco Tabini, 2
16. Mark Siegal, 2
17. Erin McKean, 2
18. Gabe Bullard, 2
19. Brittany Shoot, 2
20. Nancy Gohring, 2
21. Joe Ray, 2

A note on ordering in the above: I ordered first by number of articles, then by seniority (the latter defined as who appeared first in The Magazine). I also don’t include any of Glenn’s Editor’s Notes or the introductory essay. If you want the raw data, contact me.

What’s New?

If I compare this to the old list, here’s what jumps out:

1. Lex Friedman is still on top. In May he had 5 stories, now he has 6. He’s beatable. He’s slowing down. Still, his performance is impressive.
2. I’m way down the list. This is most interesting to me, obviously, but I went from #2 to #5 mainly because…
3. Alison Hallett & Chris Stokel-Walker are killing it. Alison appeared on the previous list, but Chris did not. While I was out watering the garden, they were writing the words.
4. The list is much longer. Previous there were 12 writers who had contributed two or more stories. Now the list has swelled to 21. The total number of writers who have contributed any stories is 86 (!) and we still see issues penned wholly by first-time contributors.

What Now?

I intend to keep climbing the ladder (stay tuned for next week’s issue). I may be the only person keeping track, but I feel that I’m in good company on that (growing) list above. We’re closing in on the one-year anniversary of The Magazine — it’ll be interesting to see where things sit at that point.

It’s also important to emphasize that, like I said above, there are a lot of first-timers showing up in the overall author list — the ratio of one-time contributors to repeat contributors is roughly 4:1. This means that you should pitch a story idea without fear that if you’re not established you won’t have a place. The Magazine is still very young, and there’s a tremendous opportunity here to connect with an audience — while retaining valuable rights to your work.

Oh yeah, and there’s a Portland, Oregon meetup on September 18th. I’ll be there, along with my new nemesis colleague Alison Hallett and lots of other writers and designers. Come to there! Drink the drinks!

But I wrote the book anyway, complete with its “Sorry, this is hard” message, and people have been getting it anyway, and that’s kinda blowing my mind. My pitch is simple: this is the real, hard, dumb, breaking-rocks job I do, complete with long rants essays about paying your taxes. The cover shows a befuddled kid. There are no money-bags on there. There is no numbered list of “secrets.” It’s really long, at least by how-to book standards. And still, people are reading the thing — many are actually starting new blogs because of it. So, here, a roundup for recent reviews by people who get it.

Gilbert Tang, Jr.

Gilbert gets it. He writes:

Nearly every book I have read on professional blogging is total bullshit. I won’t do you the disservice of linking to any of them here. Abides, however, is the first book I’ve come across that sets the record straight by honestly discussing the stuff that matters.

Bonus points for going ahead and owning the word “bullshit” there.

Tom Owens

Tom gets it. In an open letter, he writes:

Thank you, Chris Higgins.

Your Kindle e-book cover breaks the mold. There’s no dollar sign image, no sack of money. The only bone you throw to dreamy get-rich-quick bloggers is your subtitle:

“A Practical Guide to Writing Well And Not Starving.”

You are honest, detailed and real. In your “Living Small” chapter, you reveal the secret to being fiscal survival as a self-employed writer…

“The answer turned out to be staggeringly simple: they didn’t buy anything.”

True story: editor Adrienne Crezo and I went back and forth on titles and subtitles for a while. An early favorite of mine was How to Write for an Extremely Modest Living. Then I went nuts and chose a Big Lebowski reference instead.

Chris Gonzales

Chris gets it. Again, he cites the anti-message at the core of the book:

This isn’t one of those lame How-to-Become-a-Pro-Blogger books; it’s actually full of useful information one would need if they ever go freelance.

Meg Stivison

Meg gets it. She wrote an early review (thank you, early reviewers!) noting how the book is positioned at this special category of not-quite-beginning writers:

The whole thing was sort of ideal for me, because it hits a middle experience level, assuming readers aren’t exactly negotiating a larger advance on their next book, but they have some clips and a couple outlets, and would like to take freelance writing from a hobby that pays for coffee and magazines into a full career. Or at least the expensive coffee. It’s not always easy to find a guide that hits that middle area, on turning an art into a business.

And Now the Hard Sell

Listen, people. The Blogger Abides makes a great gift. Especially a gift for yourself — and it’s only four bucks.

Yes, dear readers, Lex has taken control of our reading minds from deep within his moon base New Jersey office. He has contributed articles to one-third of The Magazine’s issues. At this rate, I project that his super laser writing will supplant all other forms of human communication by early 2014.

I’m Coming for You, Lex…

I’m currently at a cabin without reliable access to the internet. But that doesn’t stop me from my mission: to find out who writes for The Magazine, and how much. Using a tin can attached to a mobile hotspot, I went through the extant issues and made a little spreadsheet (96k ZIP) of who wrote what and when. Results are below. (Also, please feel free to use the data to do your own analysis — for instance, you could figure out the gender balance in later issues, if you’re into that kind of thing.)

Top Contributors (By Number of Articles)

As of May 3, 2013:

1. Lex Friedman, 5
2. Chris Higgins, 3
3. Eli Sanders, 3 (in one issue)
4. Jason Snell, 2
5. Marco Arment, 2
6. Daniel Rutter, 2
7. Dan Moren, 2
8. Glenn Fleishman, 2
9. Serenity Caldwell, 2
10. Alison Hallett, 2
11. Chris Breen, 2
12. Mark Siegal, 2

A note on ordering in the above: I ordered first by number of articles, then by seniority (the latter defined as who appeared first in The Magazine).

In my analysis I didn’t include Marco’s introductory essay (the preface to the publication as a whole), as it doesn’t appear as an article on the website’s table of contents for any issue. If you include that, he’s a three-time contributor. Glenn’s Editor’s Notes have also been excluded, as they appear in four issues (looks like an every-issue item now) and are not “articles” per se.

The Early Crew

The first issue featured an impressive lineup: Guy English, Jason Snell, Alex Payne, and Michael Lopp (aka Rands) plus the aforementioned intro piece by Marco Arment. Only Snell went on to contribute again. It’s in the second issue that we see the rise of Friedman; that second issue includes contributions from John Siracusa, Gina Trapani, Lex Friedman, Daniel Rutter, Alex Knight, and Marco Arment. Of that second-issue crew, Lex, Brad, and Marco all returned. That pattern of repeat contributions holds up in later issues.

Rinse, Repeat

After Issue 2, almost every issue of The Magazine includes at least one repeat contributor. The exceptions are Issue 7 (where my first article appeared) and Issue 13 (with its epic 3-part piece by Eli Sanders). Of the 59 total contributors, 12 are repeat contributors.

Why does this matter? It means that a strong percentage of those who write for The Magazine are coming back and pitching again. This is significant. As a longtime freelancer, I’ve written for plenty of publications just once. A willingness to return to The Magazine indicates some mixture of enthusiasm for its format, editorial practices (read: Glenn), business, and the ease of pitching. I can tell you firsthand that The Magazine is the fastest-paying gig I’ve ever encountered — a check arrived two days after publication in the most recent case. This is insanely fast by “publishing industry” standards (where getting a check a 4-6 weeks “ish” after publication is nice if you can get it). This indicates a well-run business (or at least one that is well-funded enough to be generous with its cash flow), which is frankly a huge factor in whether writers return to the well.

The other big factor that likely encourages repeat contributors is the liberal terms of the contract. Here’s an oversimplified version: contributors may resell or otherwise reuse the work they first publish in The Magazine after about a month. This is a big deal (and unusual in magazine journalism), because it means contributors have more business opportunities for their work down the line. Want to sell a movie option on your piece? No problem, you own those rights. Want to anthologize your work and sell it on your own? Cool, go for it. Want to give it away for free on your website? Also cool. Want to expand it into a longer-form piece and sell that? Great! The emergence of interesting business models here is a huge reason why I think of The Magazine first when I pitch a story these days. I want long-term ownership of my work, and this is a rare publishing venue with a combination of good pay, a great contract, and fantastic editorial practices. What’s not to love?

Pitch On

By the time I return from my superfortress coast cabin, another issue will be out and another writer may join the ranks of the 3-time contributors’ list. It’s also possible that Lex will hit 6, in which case I’ll have to deploy peacekeeping forces.

Regardless, this is a fascinating time for The Magazine: it is still young enough that new contributors can enter the field and quickly become part of the repeat contributors’ list. But it’s mature enough that we know what it is, and we can observe some encouraging trends. Pitch on, fellow writers.

The Book

My fiancée Rochelle and I spent Christmas and the following week at the Oregon coast. Being a workaholic, I took this opportunity to complete The Blogger Abides, which entailed reading through it several times, fixing tons of typos (I still failed to catch many of them), and finishing up Kindle formatting issues I’d been sitting on for several months. I submitted the book to Amazon on December 30, 2012 assuming it would take 48 hours to publish — hoping to launch the book on January 1, 2013. And of course, it just insta-published a few hours after submission. Oh well. I had a glass of port and bought myself a copy, then enjoyed an extended stay in the hot tub.

When the book launched, a series of unexpected things happened:

1. I had no idea what to do anymore. While I’d been writing the book, there was always something concrete and book-related on my to-do list. Once I pushed the button to publish, I was in this new world where I could choose either to “market” the book (yuck) or just sit there and do nothing. Or write a new book. What to do? This was supremely uncomfortable, and was completely unexpected. There was no “yay” moment upon publication (aside from the aforementioned port and hot tub). It was simply the beginning of a new, uncomfortable phase in which my daily sense of success would be measured by sales rather than, you know, “writing.”
2. I got depressed. Related to the first point, I felt genuinely blue. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Part of it was probably that my awesome vacation was also ending, but the other part was that I had assumed publishing the book would mean something for me emotionally — would change something within me. And really, like most things I’ve published, it didn’t give me much of a feeling of accomplishment. After a few days I got back to normal, but this blue period was truly unexpected. One lesson I’ve learned as a blogger is that negative feedback stings; positive feedback is modestly helpful; and no feedback is deadly. In those first days with the book, I had a little positive feedback from friends and family (who can trust them to be impartial?), but no feedback from anybody else. It was only when I got positive reviews from unknown people that I started to think, hey, this book might actually be useful. That is when the “yay” moments began.
3. I learned about ebook marketing. I don’t think of myself as a marketing guy. But let me tell you, as soon as I had a book to market, I had to become one. So writing guest blogs, getting reviews, and moving units became part of my daily routine. I’m still new to this mode, and it still feels odd, but that’s because I’ve never had to market my own work before — it has always been in some publication, so that stuff was handled for me. I’ve been writing forever; I’ve been marketing for six weeks. It still feels icky. (Incidentally, the book makes a great gift!)

I set a modest sales goal: 100 units in the first month. For a four-dollar book, this seemed very achievable. I topped that goal in the first week. By the end of the first month, I’d more than doubled it. I’ll be speaking next month in California about the book and re-engaging with the marketing side of things, so perhaps I’ll see even more sales then.

Authorial side-note: although The Blogger Abides is the first book I’ve published, I have actually written six or seven full-length books, depending on how you count — mostly fiction, and several for money. So while I have completed book-length work before, including finishing edits with big fancy editors and all that, something always intervened to kill the book between completion and the ability for people to buy it. Not this time.

The Magazine

In a surprising coincidence, The Magazine ran my feature story on competitive Tetris players on January 3, just a few days after the book launched. It was the first (and I daresay lead) article in Issue 7. I knew that The Magazine was a big deal, but I didn’t know just how big. Within hours, I was overwhelmed with the flood of new Twitter followers and readers writing in to say how much they enjoyed it. I was also pleased that the subjects of the profile finally got to read the piece and liked it too.

But here’s the thing: running that feature story in The Magazine was a far bigger deal than publishing my own book. I didn’t expect that. But so far, it has paid me more money, earned me more goodwill and attention, and generally increased my profile far, far more than the book. The book is just another thing I did, but this Tetris article? Apparently to many readers, this is pure gold. (And let’s be clear, I’m very proud of the article, it was hard work, and the editorial touch Glenn Fleishman brought to the writing made it sing.) But that article was a few months of occasional work plus some research when I felt like it, not the eighteen-ish months of hard labor I put into the book.

Nerdy side-note: I’m not sure what The Magazine’s readership is. Because I had so much extra material for the Tetris story, I added a “Special Features” link at the end of my article. Readers could optionally visit that page for videos and stuff. Although I didn’t plan it this way, tracking visitors to that page gives me a rough sense not of readership, but perhaps of ultra-engaged readership of my particular article (and how this readership changes over time). I’m not ready to share that breakdown now, but let’s just say I think The Magazine has more readers than I expected. (I had to put WP-SuperCache in “Lock Down” mode.)

Because The Magazine is very cool, they allowed me (like all their authors) to republish my article after a one-month exclusive in their app. So I ran it on my blog on February 3, 2013. (Glenn even exported the final marked-up version and emailed it to me — something no other editor has done.) In the ensuing two-week-ish period, more than 25,000 people have read that article on my site. This is astounding, and it validates my decision to run it on my site.

I had run through a bunch of scenarios during that month about how to squeeze yet more money out of this article, but also expose it to more readers — I had thought about selling it as a Kindle ebook for a dollar, with extra text and photos; thought about pitching it to Wired as an expanded story; thought about all kinds of ways to try to get more money. But it’s not really about the money. At the end of the day, my readers were saying: let me read it, online, for free, pretty please. So I figured that was the easiest path and it would make the most people genuinely happy. I already made plenty of money on it, and if a few of those web readers picked up my book, good for me, right?

The “free on my website” strategy has worked out extremely well. I suspect that if I had tried to sell this as a $0.99 Kindle ebook, I would’ve sold fifty units and had a bunch of angry reviews complaining that it was “only” four thousand words and a few photos. If I’d pitched it to some other magazine, it’d still be in development (or the pitch might not have landed). As it is now, people are calling this the first must-read blog post of the year, a completely fascinating read, and even using lines from it in a poem. Not bad. And yeah, some Tetris article readers have bought my book too.

So, future contributors to The Magazine — it’s up to you what you do with your work after its initial run, but this approach worked for me. It meant the piece reached lots more readers, I actually made a little more money (in the form of book sales), and a few extremely classy readers even bought me stuff on my Amazon wish list as a thank-you. That is absurdly nice.

The Former Day Job

When I launched my book, I still had a thirty-hour-a-week day job. I was hedging my bets (well, paying my mortgage) by working in tech with a group of friends I’ve known and worked with for over a decade. I left that job, with hugs all around, on the last day of January. I’m still doing some tech consulting (partly to close loose ends with those friends — projects don’t end cleanly on month boundaries), but this frees me up to spend most of my days working on actual writing and reporting. At the same time, a few big leads jumped up and bit me on the nose. So I’ve been chasing down those leads. Stay tuned, everybody.

Oh Yeah, the Book

I’m preparing a second edition, fixing some awful typos, restoring emdashes (they are endashes in the current version), and putting out a print-on-demand version. That should be complete by March, in time for me to speak to the good students of UC Davis about all this stuff. If you’re in the area, come and see me — it’s free.

This article was first published in The Magazine, Issue 7.

“Three, two, one, GO!” I yell, and Ben Mullen and Bo Steil are off, playing a game of Tetris on their NES consoles almost faster than I can follow. I have to stay focused, as I’m refereeing the match at the 2012 Classic Tetris World Championship as a volunteer. My own history with Tetris involves flop sweat and throwing the controller in frustration; now my task is to observe pairs of Tetris players as they zip through the game. It takes all of my concentration to monitor the action — and I’m not even playing.¹

Dual ironies compete. Mullen and Steil are tight friends in the competitive Tetris community, although I didn’t know that as I watched them last September. They also rank among the top NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) Tetris players in the world. Mullen chooses to begin play on level 18, the highest allowable starting point.² At “GO!” the pair press START on their NES game controllers — which are nearly as old as they are³ — while a crowd looks on, clustered behind a line of blue masking tape on the concrete floor of the Oregon Convention Center.

Neither competitor can actually win. NES Tetris cannot be defeated, even in a so-called “max-out” game, in which the top possible score of 999,999 points is achieved. Every game ends with a player topping out and losing.⁴ Yet the best possible loss is exactly what these men seek, though each hope to win the Championship first.

Mullen, a 30-year-old college advisor from Minnesota, takes the first game with 308,237 points.⁵ Steil tops out at 253,539 points, and the thrift-store CRT television connected to his NES shows an end-game animation. I put on my best referee voice: “Good game, guys!” Neither man smiles. They hardly look at each other.

Steil wins the second game, forcing a third game as a tiebreaker. In that final game, Mullen tops out, and his frustration is obvious. He runs his hands through his shaggy brown hair and frowns, fiddling with his controller as Steil quietly slams tetrominoes into place.⁶ Steil keeps an eye on the score box, and drops his controller the instant he beats Mullen’s score.

I record the results, pass them to the head referee, and Steil crosses the blue-taped line as a quarterfinalist. He is eliminated early in the next round.

999,999

Mullen’s loss stings. He was the number three seed in a field of 50, and this is his third year failing to win the Championship. Victory for Mullen always seems just out of reach. As he says in the documentary Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters, “The one trick to training [at] Tetris is to be always almost dead.”

Mullen’s gameplay reflects his philosophy, with his stack of tetrominoes often showing gaps and rising dangerously high, only to be knocked down in the nick of time. After decades of gameplay⁷, he has come within seconds of a perfect, 999,999-point max-out game nine times⁸, but perennially scores short just one “tetris” of a perfect score. (In one painfully memorable instance, he topped out at 996,500 points.)⁹

Mullen and his wife, Mary, return to Minnesota after the loss on September 30. But Mullen doesn’t quit. At home he plays what he calls “Rage Tetris,” inspired by frustration.¹⁰ Exactly one week after his Championship loss, Mullen posts a photo on Facebook: It shows the NES Tetris high score screen, revealing that BEN M has achieved 999,999 points.

This is only the seventh time anyone in the world has achieved this feat¹¹, and it earns him the #2 global rank, just behind Matt Buco.¹² Competitor-slash-friend Buco jokes, “Fake…you are only allowed within 1 tetris [of winning]. Nice job Ben!” To celebrate the max out, Mary gave Ben a bottle of Crown Royal and two cans of Pepsi Max.¹³

Blue Tape

Bo Steil spends his days in a 3M factory making the same blue masking tape that separated him from the crowd at the Tetris Championship. Each spool is a model of orderly precision. Steil, 31, says that Tetris is always on his mind, though he claims that his day job indicates a certain lack of ambition. “I’m the guy that everyone meets and says, ‘What the heck are you wasting your time working here for?'”

It’s clear that Steil has at least one abiding ambition: Tetris mastery. Steil quit college two classes short of a bachelor’s degree, and his high school career was mixed, as he didn’t bother to do homework. “In algebra, I’d actually sit and play Tetris on my TI-83 calculator during the majority of class. I was the #1 calculator Tetris player in the school.” He currently ranks #13 in the world, and plays every evening in an attempt to max out.

Steil’s quest for Tetris supremacy started more than a decade ago. He began taking Tetris seriously in 2000, and his goal was to clear as many lines as possible.¹⁴ He set a personal record of 292 lines in 2001 (though he didn’t verify the record with Twin Galaxies, the de facto video game high score arbiters) and signed his own Tetris cartridge in victory. He then hung up his controller.

In 2008, Steil saw the documentary King of Kong and decided to check with Twin Galaxies to see if his unofficial lines record had been broken. He discovered that Ben Mullen had bested him, putting up a record of 296 lines. Discouraged, Steil didn’t attempt to beat Mullen’s record.¹⁵

But then in May 2012, Steil went to an Ecstasy of Order screening in Minneapolis. Mullen was there to introduce the movie and to host a mini-tournament beforehand. Steil met Mullen for the first time when they played a match together, which was Steil’s first game of Tetris since about 2001. Steil was shocked by Mullen’s ability to play smoothly on the high levels, and Mullen won that game. But Steil proceeded to beat all the other entrants, earning him free tickets to the show.

The men became friends after discovering they lived an hour’s drive apart and that they had independently sought the same Tetris lines record for more than a decade. Just four months after that first meeting, Steil had upped his game enough to eliminate Mullen in Championship play.

Steil often starts his Tetris training sessions around 1 a.m. He continues until as late as 5 a.m., then sleeps before it’s time to work in the blue tape factory. He is driven, and his rise to Tetris prominence has come fast, although it’s a lonely game. “It is a battle with yourself. That’s who you play with over and over,” he told me. It’s rare that he has the opportunity to interact with other players in person.

The Lonely Tetris Masters

NES Tetris is a one-player game, and its masters are willing to put in long hours, typically for years, playing the game in solitude. Steil said, “The overwhelming time is spent by yourself, alone in the dark, game after game, minute after minute, hour after hour.” Steil likes to play with a second TV on, while Mullen prefers music.¹⁶

Despite — or perhaps because of — the intrinsically solitary nature of their game, Tetris masters have formed a community online. All the top players are Facebook friends, and many have become friends in daily life. This leads to friends constantly both competing against and encouraging each other.

Steil explains that “any time someone passes you in score, you are happy for them and ticked at the same time. That’s usually when I play the worst, when I’m playing like I need to get a score.” He says his games go much better if he just sits back and lets them come. Steil’s friendship with Mullen is textured by competition and their shared quest to max out, which each had hoped to achieve before the other. After Mullen maxed out, Steil recalls his friend told him that “he was happy to get it out of the way. Now he can truly cheer me on.”

This is the core of competitive Tetris: a group of friends who all want to win, but feel bad about beating each other. Steil told me he didn’t want to play Mullen at the Championship (and indeed I had no idea the players knew each other at the time), but the luck of the draw pitted him against his closest friend in the community. The fact that Steil was eliminated in the quarterfinals (making him #8 in the Championship overall) was bittersweet: Steil had arrived as a serious player, but he got there by beating his friend.

Minor Successes and Monumental Failures

When Steil achieved his current high score of 889,131 points (and 222 lines) in October of 2012, it felt like a loss. Despite being Steil’s best game to date, it represented a failure to reach the perfection of a max out. When he posted the score on Facebook for his Tetris friends to see, he wrote, “Another new high score, but what a choke job at 222 [lines]. Each new high score is a minor success as well as a monumental failure.”

This attitude pervades competitive Tetris, and it highlights the perverse aspect that the best game is still a loss.¹⁷ Faced with this harsh reality, NES Tetris players have devised ways to compete (the Championship), milestones to achieve (max outs and high numbers of lines per game), and ways to measure performance (max outs achieved starting at higher levels are more difficult due to the game’s speed). Fundamentally, however, players compete against themselves and lose every time.¹⁸

After Mullen maxed out, I asked him how it felt. He had four answers. “Great, because it’s so hard to do. Liberating, because now I can play for fun. Relieving, because so many great players are fighting for position all the time. Bittersweet, because the chase is now over.” It’s instructive that Mullen feels he can only now “play for fun”; he has the attitude of a professional athlete who has reached a level of mastery in a sport and can look again at what drew him to it in the first place.

Co-op Mode

After maxing out NES Tetris, Mullen turned his attention to its sibling: Tengen Tetris, an alternate version of the game that was briefly on the market in 1989 before it was the subject of a legal battle. Tengen Tetris differs from NES Tetris — it has a multiplayer mode and a co-op mode, and most importantly it reaches a stable top speed. Unlike NES Tetris, which speeds up with every level, eventually breaking most players with the brutally fast level 29 “death screen,” Tengen Tetris tops out at a comparatively leisurely pace on level 17. This, combined with a score counter that flips over and restarts¹⁹ rather than stopping at 999,999, means that Tetris masters can play indefinitely, limited only by endurance.

On November 20, 2012, Steil decided to try his hand at a Tengen Tetris marathon. Tetris legend Thor Aackerlund (winner of the 1990 Nintendo World Championships) held the world record on the game, having scored 3.5 million points during a marathon session in 2010. Steil spent over four hours playing and scored 10.4 million points, shattering Aackerlund’s record.²⁰ He stopped only because he had to go to work.

Steil is still actively pursuing an NES Tetris max out, playing with the same steady intensity that earned him a spot in the Championship. When he’s not playing NES Tetris, he plays Tengen, and he has begun playing in co-op mode with Mullen, simultaneously dropping pieces into a single gigantic well. With Tengen Tetris, the pair can finally play together and share their victory; Mullen says they plan to set the high score record for cooperative play. Despite this newfound sense of shared accomplishment, both men intend to compete in the 2013 Championship and “win” as best they can.

This article comes with Special Features.

Update, 29 August 2013: Bo Steil maxed out NES Tetris today, after months of effort. You can watch his 999,999-point performance on YouTube.

Author’s Note

This article was originally published in The Magazine, Issue 7. It took me several months to report and write, and after its exclusive run in The Magazine, I had a choice: should I put it on my website for free, put it up for sale on Kindle/whatever, or leave it solely at The Magazine where some readers can’t access it? For lots of reasons I chose to make it free.

If you want to support my writing, you can buy my book about making a living as a writer (or borrow it if you’re a Prime member — that still kicks money to me), get me something from my wish list (if anyone does this I will be shocked), follow me on Twitter, follow me on Google+, or just drop me a line.

What’s next? More articles in The Magazine, in Mental Floss, and beyond.

Do You Know the Coders of NES Tetris?

I’m working on a followup story, and have been searching for anyone on the team that coded NES Tetris. The Tetris masters I’ve been interviewing for all this time are curious about the process behind the creation of the NES version of the game. If you know anyone who might have a lead, please contact me so this bit of video game history can be recorded.

Footnotes

^{1. The game of Tetris, originally developed in 1984, sports blocks of four units in various shapes descending one unit at a time inexorably from the top to the bottom of the screen. The player moves blocks left or right and rotates them around their axis to fill holes in incomplete rows at the bottom. A filled row disappears, scoring points. The game speeds up over time, varying by version. A player loses when the screen fills with incomplete rows of blocks. In most versions, there is no way to win.↩}

^{2. At the CTWC, players are allowed to start games of “A-Type” Tetris, played on vintage Nintendo hardware, at any point from levels 9 to 16, or on level 18. Why not level 17? 2012 CTWC organizer Adam Cornelius tells me and the other referees that “on level 17, the colors are kind of a mauve and violet and don’t stand out against the black background enough. All the TVs are different. It could cause a big disadvantage if one player had a lower-contrast TV. And level 17 is just really ugly.”↩}

^{3. The Nintendo Entertainment System was released in the US in 1985; NES Tetris in 1989. Both men were born in the 1980s.↩}

^{4. In Tetris, “topping out” occurs when the stack of pieces reaches the top of the screen, ending the game.↩}

^{5. For comparison’s sake, my best game of Tetris ever was around 50,000 points, and that involved a lot of screaming at the TV.↩}

^{6. Top NES Tetris players often bring their own controllers to competitions, like athletes carrying their own bats or musicians their instruments. Mullen brought his own, but Steil used an onsite controller, since he had bought an NES only months earlier and its two included controllers weren’t great.↩}

^{7. He began playing in 1989 but says he only got “serious” about Tetris around 1999.↩}

^{8. In NES Tetris, the score counter stops at 999,999. The game does not. It is only possible to score 999,999 points at very high levels (typically level 29), making it a rare achievement. Because of its insane difficulty (and perhaps because it’s well known to most players), NES Tetris is the canonical Tetris used in the Classic Tetris World Championship.↩}

^{9. Scoring a “tetris” means clearing four lines at once, only achievable by dropping a long bar vertically into a slot. This grants the player a huge score boost: 1200 points times one higher than the current level’s number (1200 × (level + 1)). Mullen refers to his one-tetris-away-from-a-perfect-score games as “one-aways.” For example, on March 7, 2012, he earned a 996,500 score on level 28 — that’s just one tetris away from a max out. His Facebook comment: “I have no words.”↩}

^{10. Mullen explained in an email: “The most rage I ever felt in the game was the month after Matt Buco maxed out in January 2012. The rage allowed me to play more than normal, with more anger than normal, and with better outcomes than normal.”↩}

^{11. Harry Hong was the first NES Tetris player with a documented max out, recorded in 2009.↩}

^{12. Mullen’s rank is reflected in a community-run leaderboard maintained by Tetris Grand Master Alex Kerr.↩}

^{13. Mullen’s max-out game is on YouTube in its entirety, as are many others.↩}

^{14. Tetris tracks the number of lines cleared in addition to the player’s score. Separate records are maintained for lines and points.↩}

^{15. The records kept by Twin Galaxies have been offline for months during an ownership change. Promised months ago to return in November, the site’s message now says “early 2013.”↩}

^{16. Mullen said he listens to “’90s music or golden oldies,” and turns the Tetris music off — though he leaves the sound effects on (which he calls “the beeps”), so he can use them for feedback. Steil watches either sports or shows he can mostly ignore; he says it’s the only way he can still watch Dexter.↩}

^{17. Mullen actually sees this as a positive feature of Tetris. He writes: “I love a game that doesn’t end with a silly celebration! Tetris is made perfectly this way; you play, you lose, you go to bed. In real life, basketball courts and football fields don’t tell how great they think you are after you do something good, you just do something good and pride yourself in it.”↩}

^{18. What appeals to me most about these players is their unabashed pursuit of a series of white whales. When Mullen couldn’t win the Championship, he raged his way into a max out — a goal that had eluded him for years. Steil is only half a year into his quest for the max out; it could be days, months, or years before he achieves it, but he just keeps trying. For competitive Tetris players, record-setting success arrives in an instant, after a series of defeats that stretches over staggering lengths of time.↩}

^{19. The Tengen Tetris score counter flips over to 100,000 rather than the more obvious 0, which makes keeping track of scores in the millions an exercise in arithmetic. Steil writes, “An [easy] way to look at it is first flip is a million, every other one after that is +900,000.”↩}

^{20. No bathroom breaks or pauses are allowed, though Tengen Tetris does periodically pause itself between levels, showing statistics and counting up points, allowing the player a roughly half-minute respite to stretch his or her thumbs. Tengen players joke that it’s only a matter of time before someone attempts a marathon record while wearing a diaper.↩}