In its most vanilla, near-ubiquitous form, Tetris is already a near perfect video game that challenges you to be smart and fast in increasingly hard fashion. The stuff that gets thrown at you in an ultra-hard arcade version is mind-blowing. Blocks that need to be cleared twice. A stack that flips around. Let’s watch one of the best Tetris players in the world take it on.
The video above is showing the Item Mode feature in Tetris: The Grand Master 2, taken on by Japanese grandmaster SQR as part of the Summer Games Done Quick charity speedrun marathon. In the ten-minute clip from last night’s stream, you’ll see him deal with a Death Block where the tetromino are twice as big, Roll Roll Transform which changes into a different tetrominoes every time you rotate and 180 item that turns the whole stack upside down. SQR handles it all like the champion he is and the gasps of the crowd watching him play are a great indicator of just how crazy this playthrough is.