On Sunday evening, the first official live playable Tetris game in the sky was hosted by Red Bull Gaming. The spectacular backdrop to the game was the glitzy city of Dubai’s night sky, with the Tetris action animated using thousands of RGB drones. The Dubai Frame, a 150m (492 feet) tall structure which is adequately described by its name, formed the towering playfield for the iconic block-dropping gaming competition.
Fehmi Atalar of Türkiye was the winner of the tournament, claiming the first-ever Red Bull Tetris global crown. It had been a long path to glory. Red Bull says there were “more than 7 million games played in qualifiers, National Finals in 60 countries, and a full day of World Final knock-out brackets.” The lucky few qualifiers would end up at the grand final at the Dubai Frame last night.
The pre-final saw rivals from Türkiye and Peru go head-to-head for three minutes “with their Tetriminos created in real time by a fleet of 2,800 drones: 1,400 for each player,” explains Red Bull. After winning this stage, Atalar opted to send his opponent to the final round first.
Peru's Leo Solórzano would score 57,164 in his personal 5-minute RGB drone Tetris session. With the advantage of having a target to beat, Atalar excelled, crushing his opponent with a 5-minute score of 168,566.
“Over [my] five years of Tetris experience, this was the best moment, and this event was one of a kind. It's not a thing you can describe in words,” Atalar said of his extremely successful tournament experience.
You can see from the pictures and videos of the evening that it is no overstatement to describe this as a spectacular event. With Tetris, this is also such a huge contrast from its origins. The iconic puzzler is probably best known as the Nintendo Game Boy pack-in, experienced on a 2.5-inch 160x144 pixels 2-bit display. Compare that to the thousands of RGB drones within the huge Dubai Frame'd night sky.
The last time we reported on Tetris gaming was earlier this year, when a canny developer managed to embed a playable version of the iconic title into a PDF. That achievement also strongly contrasts with yesterday's glittering event.
Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.
