Swiss Artist Plays Tetris with Real People
Prepare to scream, smile and shake a fist while watching The Original Human Tetris.
Watching someone play Tetris is both thrilling and stressful. Although we enjoy watching people play the game, sometimes we want to take over whenever a person makes a bad move. When that happens, we can’t help but scream, “No, don’t put that Tetrimino there!”
This should be the title of Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond’s incredibly popular YouTube video, The Original Human Tetris Performance, which has over 14 million views since 2007; ancient by Internet standards, but we stand by the saying, an oldie but a goodie.
As for some of the moves that the invisible “player” makes… we’ll let you form your own opinion.
First, the actual video. Reymond put a bunch of people in different colored t-shirts, had them stand in
The player even rotates the Tetriminos to make them fit perfectly. Well, at least this is how the game begins. There’s a Z-Tetrimino that appears at 27 seconds and there’s an obvious place for it to go, nestled between a red I-Tetrimino and J-Tetrimino, but the player makes an unexpected move that made us gasp, followed by some other moves that had us desperately wanting to pick up the controller and fix everything.
To the gamer’s credit, he or she does manage to hang in there for almost two minutes while clearing several lines, and Reymond perfectly captures the elation one feels when the I-Tetrimino appears when gamers need it the most. While not a true Tetris Line Clear, the moment is so good that we experienced a small amount of fist-pumping joy.
Incredible, considering this isn’t a real game. Definitely give Reymond’s video a watch, as it’s one of the coolest Tetris tributes we’ve seen. Remember, he had to get these people to stand in perfect alignment and then take hundreds of photos to create the illusion of Tetris. And to the person performing the Tetris theme music, bravo! Now we can’t stop singing “bum, bum, bum, bum” at work.
Fortunately, this isn’t the only game inspired video from Guillaume Reymond. He also paid homage to the arcade classic, Pac-Man. Check out his tribute the next time you need a break at work.
This article was not sponsored or endorsed by Guillaume Reymond and is for informational and commentary purposes only.
