This run is the culmination of all my time spent playing this game. In my opinion, it's far more impressive than anything I've ever done in NES Tetris. Here's why.

Although NES Tetris was released some 16odd years before TGM3, the real metas for the achievements of today were developed very recently. Tapping only really rose to prominence in 2018, and rolling was revealed just over a year ago, in 2021. I personally view these playstyle shifts as making the game an almost entirely new game, unlocking things that were never possible before, like the ability to play consistently on Level 29.

In TGM3, the meta was set in stone either right at the game's release, or, depending on how you think about it, 17 years before with the release of Sega Tetris. It's a very simple game that's easy to understand but incredibly hard to master, and people have had 17 years so far to master it.

Contrast this with NES Tetris, where people have only had a single year to master the much more mechanically demanding, in my opinion, playstyle of rolling, along with stacking on the Level 29 killscreen. I don't personally think we'll ever have a hard limit in terms of the records that can be achieved, and it'll eventually just become a battle of who can sit down and play the longest game. It hasn't gotten even close to there yet, but it's seriously getting there.

Japanese TGM3 players have had 17 years to play TGM3 since it came out, and even more time to play the previous TGM games before it came out. I'm honestly just amazed that it took me, someone with zero experience playing Tetris previously, only three years to exceed, in my opinion, one of the greatest Tetris games ever played of all time.

That is why I believe this is far more special than anything I've achieved in NES Tetris. It's beating the best recorded time of a community that's been playing since the release of the game, compared to being part of the initial surge of records brought on by new developments. Don't get me wrong, NES Tetris world records are still impressive, but I don't think that any of the records today will matter in the long run. This record, on the other hand, definitely will matter to me.


But this isn't the end for me. ZAB has an unrecorded 4:03 that he got in 2011. And I'm definitely going to grind for that soon...
  / ericicx