I won a dollar playing Tetris today. For the uninitiated, the official Tetris app for phones and tablets has nightly contests, and as long as you clear level one you’re entered into a draw to win a dollar. Yes, if you pass more than one level you have the chance to win more money, so no, it’s not really impressive at all that I cleared level one and won a dollar, but it does mean two things:
I am technically a prize-winning Tetris player, so, in the way that a doctor might insist you call him Dr. Gary instead of regular old Gary, I will respond now only to “Prize-Winning Tetris Player Curtis Mutter.”
My mother’s adage, “You’ll never make any money playing video games,” has officially been disproven.
Now, what to do with my prize money? My sportsman’s purse. Perhaps I’ll walk in the footsteps of star athletes before me and blow it all on fast cars and wild drugs. Maybe I’ll put it toward starting my own Tetris training center for troubled youth so they can learn the power of dropping shapes on top of other shapes and use this wisdom to stay off the streets. First I’ll have to see if paypal will let me transfer a single dollar into my bank account - I’m guessing not.
At best, I’ll probably have to break another one of my mother’s adages and spend this dollar all in one place. At worst, this dollar will sit in my paypal account for years - unless I’m able to win enough dollars in future Tetris games to get to paypal’s minimum withdrawal limit. I’ve seen enough YouTube videos of pro Tetris players to know I’m not walking away with that $500 1st place money anytime soon. No, this fortune will me amassed a dollar at a time.
Unless! Why fight it? I will get good enough to collect those top prize purses every day! I never thought I’d get all the chaos emeralds in Sonic 1, but I knocked that baby out in the first month of COVID. Yeah, I got this. I’ll win the grand prize every night! And I’ll transfer all my dollars into my bank and get the bank to exchange them all into Canadian Loonies, and I’ll shout, “Fuck you, troubled youth!” as I dive into my pile of money Scrooge McDuck style, because I learned while training to be the best Tetris player of all time that I had to look out for numero uno (and T-shaped Tetris pieces, they’re really handy). And I’ll live in my big, lonely mansion, and they’ll make a Citizen Kane type movie about me, only in this version I’ll get why my girlfriend likes to make puzzles because puzzles fit together like Tetris blocks and things fitting together like Tetris blocks is the only thing that makes sense to me anymore, which is ironic because I could be bringing the troubled youth together like Tetris blocks with my training center but instead I’m walking around in vast empty rooms, commenting on my girlfriend’s puzzle playing. And in real life I’ll drop a snow globe as I lay dying and say the name of my favourite childhood sled, but in the movie they’ll change the snow globe to a Tetris Gameboy cartridge and instead of saying the name of a sled I’ll say, “I’ve blocked out,” because that jives better with the theme of the film.
Yep, I think it’s only a matter of time until my Tetris skills are so legendary that people will mention my name in the same sentence as Bobby Ore and, you know, the other good sports people. I’ll be so famous that people will call Michael Jordan the Curtis Mutter of basketball. Do you think I’m bluffing? Maybe I am, but hey, I’m not a poker player. I’m just Prize-Winning Tetris Player Curtis Mutter.