About
About? About what? Me? The site?
The Site
This site is a repository of accumulated knowledge from years of effort on the part of numerous amazing people, and although I am the writer of this website, I, HydrantDude, am only a part of a much bigger list of amazing game researchers. I'd like to take this section to talk about them. Kirjava is responsible for making the game so much more accessible for all the pros to practice by creating the ROMhack Tetris Gym. To make the hack at all, he also contributed immensely to our collective knowledge about the game. Another pillar of the hacking community is Zohassadar, who may not have had the chance to find out new info for us, but sure did make up for it with some extraordinary romhacks- still in awe of his work on NES Pentris. Kitaru, or Alex Kerr as he appears in CTWC, is one of the all-time best all-around tetris players, and was the first person to really look into the technical side of things in this game. When I was learning, and to this day, if you had a question about the game, you could ask Kitaru and find the answer. Meatfighter, or Michael Birken, created this webpage which has served as a reference material on the game for the community for virtually everything that matters, and the guy doesn't even interact with the NEStris community! The majority of glitches in the game were first documented on the meatfighter website; colors, crash, he found them all before anyone else thought to check. He collected his knowledge in the page in pursuit of creating an AI to play the game- he was the very first to do so. Not the last, mind you; I'll shoutout Greg Cannon's StackRabbit which remains the most accessible AI to the playerbase, and Adrien Wu's betatetris which is just really good at the game. Also on the research end I'd like to mention negativemaya, whose knowledge of NES games is extensive; she's got a wonderful website that explains all the glitches in SMB1. In Tetris, she constructed a full simulator of the game, as well as building various Lua scripts to do cool things like check whether the game is going to crash. I'd like to also put forth Kirby703 and Fractal161 as contributors to our collective knowledge base as a community. Fractal has done a lot of hard testing work as well as built amazing romhacks like rollhack and speedhack which both use precise timing to read the controller at blistering speeds, one to tell you how well you press buttons, and one to just run the game at 6x speed. Kirby has also done cool hacks, like 7 bag, and, not to sound like a broken record, but she's responsible for loads of knowledge we have about the game. I might as well also thank the programmers of the game at Nintendo RnD 1, whoever they were, for such a compelling title that we still care about it 35 years later.
Me
I'm HydrantDude, Jounce, Max Roy, whatever. I started playing NES tetris in November 2018 and am still playing it, for some reason. Professionally, I am, surprisingly, not a programmer; I work in architectural historic preservation, but hobby-wise I enjoy dissecting the technicalities of videogames, so I'm here on the super nerdy side of things. I've rigged a couple spreadsheets, one that runs the game's randomizer function, and one that calculates crash probabilities, as well as making the leaderboard spreadsheet for the community. I also built some early romhacks for the community - I gave the community access to same piece sets, tapping/rolling speed display, and 7 digit scoring. I've also trolled a bit, once as "cheminatingly" in 2020 and again as "jounce" in 2021. Chem was me playing on a cheater ROMhack (nobody caught me until I revealed it myself) and jounce was me playing with cheater playstyle (rolling). I got the world record as Jounce. Jounce is a furry, by the way, which I also am, by extension. I'm an artist, too. I like making things in general.