Adam Cornelius on the Tetris players in his documentary Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters
Adam Cornelius interviewed at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam, 2011.
Adam Cornelius: Oh yeah, I mean I think to some extend they've wrapped up a lot of their hopes and dreams in this game. And I think a lot of them see the humor in that. And they realize that maybe they've taken it too far. But I think also, there really is... I think the Tetris game itself almost becomes like an oracle. Or some kind of, it has some sort of like talis... it's like a talisman or they have like a spiritual connection with the game.
It's like the sword and the stone. You know, like, who can actually do this. Because it's so hard that for years people didn't even believe it was possible. And I think that to me it almost becomes like these mythological achievements.
Yeah, I think it's an obsession, but it also becomes... they even mention the Tetris God. It becomes like a mystical thing. Like, is it gonna give me what I need at this point, you know. So I think that that's what dreaming to the subject is. When you have a piece of technology, that is theoretically neutral, you know, it has no emotional value. It's just a game with blocks. But yet, when someone's played that game for 20 years non-stop, it becomes almost a spiritual relationship with the game. And I hope, I mean I never explicitly say that in the movie, but I have hope that people come away with that. That it becomes almost like a way of life or a journey of some kind.
The Tetris game that we portray in the movie, which is Nintendo Tetris, that came out in 1988, I think part of the charm is that it is brutally hard.
