2010 · Tetris (NES, 1989) · Classic Tetris World Championship · Downtown Independent theatre, Los Angeles
In August 2010 a handful of the best players of a twenty-year-old NES game met in a Los Angeles cinema, filmed for a documentary. It was the start of the most unlikely revival in competitive gaming.
By 2010 NES Tetris, released by Nintendo in 1989, had a small community of devoted high-score players who had kept improving at a game most people had long since put away. The first Classic Tetris World Championship brought them together on 8 August 2010 at the Downtown Independent theatre in Los Angeles. In the audience were Henk Rogers — the businessman who had secured Tetris's console rights for Nintendo in 1989 — and a film crew making the documentary Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters, released in 2011. The format deliberately echoed the 1990 Nintendo World Championships, where Tetris had been one of the three competition games. Five semi-final places were reserved for distinguished players — Jonas Neubauer, Harry Hong, Ben Mullen, Jesse Kelkar and Thor Aackerlund, the 1990 Nintendo World Champion — and eight players then completed three Tetris challenges to decide two finalists. Jonas Neubauer beat Harry Hong in the final and took home $1,000. The event was small, but it was enough to establish an annual tradition. From 2012 the championship moved to Portland, Oregon, and as players adopted faster input techniques and the matches began to be streamed, Classic Tetris grew into one of the most watched retro competitions in the world. Neubauer went on to win the title seven times before his death in 2021.
Winner: Jonas Neubauer
Most competitive scenes grow up around games that are still being updated and sold. Classic Tetris grew up around a cartridge that had not changed since 1989. Everything that improved after 2010 — the scores, the techniques, the speed at which the game could be played — came from the players alone, which is a large part of why the scene became so compelling to watch.