jmdFirst to rec
“You might've heard the news a couple years ago that a kid finally beat Tetris. The story of the world records leading up to that, the development of the controller techniques that the top players use, the bizarre ways that the game starts to degrade when you get into the really high levels, and the very specific circumstances that cause the game to crash at the end so that it's possible to "win" turn out to be fascinating.
The video is feature-length (almost two hours long!), but after I watched this awhile ago, I put it on the TV so my kids could watch it because I thought they'd find it interesting, and then I ended up just sitting down with them and watching the entire thing a second time. It's that good.
(He also has another very good video about the quest to beat Mike Tyson at the end of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out as fast as possible, which involves incredible frame-by-frame precision and is also full of fascinating details about how the game, and the mechanics of that fight in particular, actually works.)”
