YouTuber aGameScout detailed this new up-and-coming playstyle that is taking the Tetris community by storm. Prior to this, DAS and Hypertapping were the two standards for Tetris pros, but Rolling allows for a high amount of button presses per second without the “superhuman finger speeds” needed for Hypertapping, modified controllers, or any gloves – which also makes it is perfectly legal for tournament play.This technique, which is also called Flyheccing, was popularized by Hector “Fly” Rodriguez, who used Rolling on arcade cabinets to achieve higher speeds on Track and Field. However, the buttons on arcade cabinets are much larger than an NES controller, making it hard for it to translate to Tetris on Nintendo’s first console, up until now.
Cheez_Fish finally discovered a way to make it work on the NES after a viewer thought he was rolling his hands due to the slow framerate of his webcam. He took that to heart and watched a YouTube tutorial on button mashing where a player was getting extra taps by pushing the controller into the finger over the controller from the other side.
Image Credit: aGameScout on YouTube
You can the Rolling technique here, as it is easier to grasp when watching it in action. However, it has the player position their thumb over the dpad direction they want to use, and then they roll their fingers on the bottom of the controller like a big button to achieve these high number of button taps.It took a lot of practice, but he eventually was able to consistently get 20 buttons taps per second. Cheez then started using this technique in tournaments like the WPL Classic Tetris Open 5 and achieved the first 1,300,000+ score and the Most Lvl 29+ Tetrises (4) in tournament history.
He then set a world record for the highest score on a Level 29 Start with 259,000 points.
Now, alongside DAS – which was the standard way to play Tetris by using pressing the dpad once and holding to control side movement – and Hypertapping – which has players tap the dpad as many times as they can in succession – we now have Rolling. It will be interesting to see how it is adopted and if it ends up becoming the new standard for NES Tetris play.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
