There is, at any given moment, someone on Twitch playing Tetris before a live audience.
On a recent Thursday night, the star attraction was a 14-year-old named Michael Artiaga, better known by his handle Dog, who is the 2020 and 2021 world champion on a game nearly three times his age. His hands moved across a narrow Nintendo controller with the breeziness of a cocktail pianist as he stacked the game’s familiar falling shapes and cleared one row after another. From time to time, he reached forward to take a bite of a sandwich.
In less than 10 minutes, Artiaga amassed points and reached levels that were inconceivable during the first 25 years of the game’s existence.