Sam Hughes is a bad man. A bad but brilliant man. He’s taken the one of the most popular video games of all time, captured its most frustrating behavior (screwing you over with seemingly the worst possible piece at the worst possible time), and turned that flaw into a strange and tight little game all its own.
By his own admission, Sam didn’t invent the idea, but he’s pursued its absurdity with near-academic rigor: Hatetris uses a nonrandom Tetris algorithm to relentlessly fuck with you. (E.g., “Hey, look, another fucking S-piece!”)
- Our best score is a paltry three lines.
Sam’s top score is five lines, and he wrote the damn game. He’s been tracking high scores, though (scroll down to the updates), and just a couple days ago some disturbed Tetris Rain Man in Japan managed to get a completely ridiculous 30 lines.
The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes.
OH DAMN IT
This game makes me want to punch a wall.
Just played four times. High score of 3.
OH MY GOD.
I JUST GOT 6 WOOOO
all it did is give me ‘s’ pieces. It’s pretty easy to write an unbeatable tetris when all you do is dispense those.
Still, writing this in javascript must have been a bitch.
This U.S. government needs to put whoever created this into a bunker somewhere. DO NOT LET HIM FALL INTO ENEMY HANDS.
I got 5
I’d play more of it but it killed my hand/wrist. Ouch.
6
Ok, srsly… all I got was S pieces. I want my money back.
I got 31
I fucking hate you, Stranger Testing Department
AARGH!
@5, you really do get at least *some* non-S pieces. Check his Hatetris commentary page: http://qntm.org/hatetris
Also from there, funny, re; JavaScript: “…every coder has to build Tetris at least once in their life. In addition, I also have a passionate hatred of JavaScript, but I felt that that hatred was borne out of ignorance, so this was an attempt to reconnect with that most derided and crippled of languages. The latter failed, but there you go.”
I filled almost the entire board on only got one non-s piece.
Okay, tried again and got quite a few non-s-pieces. Just depends on your strategy. Only got 2 rows though.
2 games (2 & 5)
I got only S pieces, but I did get an inverted version of the S piece I had been getting exactly when I didn’t need it.
two games ~ all “S” except for one unfortunately timed “L.” i got 0 lines and then 4 lines.
some things are enjoyably frustrating, others just frustrating. i see no point to this.
ok, after fiddling with it for about an hour.. 7 rows baby, yeah! Never have I felt so proud for accomplishing so little.