Established 2010 | Number of tournaments One annually | |
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The Classic Tetris World Championship (CTWC) is a video game competition series, hosted by the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. The competition launched in 2010, during the filming of Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters to determine the world's greatest Tetris player. The first two years the competition was held in Los Angeles, California but has since moved to Portland, Oregon and has been held there annually since 2012.
Contents
The contestants play on actual Nintendo Entertainment Systems and CRT-Televisions. The final rounds are streamed online with live-edited screens and Head-up display to improve viewer experience. The tournament has been dominated by Jonas Neubauer, who has won six titles and only lost the final in 2014 to Harry Hong.
Competition
The competition takes place over two days, with the Qualifying Round on the first day and the Main Event on the second. Contestants are allowed to bring their own controller, but it must be an original, unmodified NES Controller.
Qualifying Round
Qualifying takes place on a fixed number of NES stations. Entrants play "Type A" Tetris, starting on level 9 or higher, and are ranked based on their final score. Once an entrant's game ends for any reason, his/her total must be recorded by a tournament scorekeeper in order to be valid. Entrants may make as many qualifying attempts as they wish, but must return to the back of the waiting line for each one. Additionally there is the option to pay small amount of money and rent a station for an hour.
The top 32 scorers are seeded into a tournament bracket for the Main Event.
Main Event
The Main Event is a single-elimination tournament consisting of five rounds of head-to-head matches, with seeds from opposite ends of the rankings pitted against each other in the first round (#1 vs. #32, #2 vs. #31, etc.).
For the first game of each match, the higher-seeded player chooses the starting level (9-18 for the first two rounds, 15 or higher for the last three). Both players begin to play at the same time on separate systems, and the game continues until one of the following occurs:
The lower-seeded player chooses the starting level for the second game; if a third game is needed, the higher-seeded player chooses the level.
Two games are needed to win a match and advance in the first four rounds, while the finals are best three out of five.
Cartridge
The Classic Tetris World Championships competition is played on the original 8-bit NintendoTetris cartridge (not the Tengen version). Individuals that supported the event received a gold limited edition copy of the game. Each cartridge is a hand painted NES Tetris cartridge with a custom Classic Tetris World Championship label. The cartridge comes inside an NES style cardboard box. Around 12-26 gold carts are produced each year (CTWC Event Producer, email, June 29, 2015). In 2014, the boxes and cartridges were numbered 1-26.
Side events
During the expo there have been several tournaments on other systems over the years, for example: Tetris & Dr. Mario on SNES, Tetris Ultimate on the PlayStation 4 or Tetris: The Grand Master 2 on Arcade.