Thor Aackerlund | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | January 4, 1977 |
| Years active | 1990–2012 |
| Era | 1990s and 2010s |
| Known for | 1990 Nintendo World Championships Winner [1] [2] [3] |
| Competition record | ||
|---|---|---|
| Classic Tetris | ||
| Nintendo World Championships | ||
| 1st | 1990 Houston Championship age 12–17 | |
| 1st | 1990 World Finals age 12–17 | |
| Classic Tetris World Championship | ||
| 5th | 2010 Tetris World Championship | |
Thor Bjorn Thorlei Aackerlund (born 4 January 1977) is an American competitive gamer, considered one of the first to go professional. [4]
As a child, Aackerlund started playing computer games while waiting for a new school year to begin after having missed one due to his mother being hospitalized after a fire. [5] He couldn't afford a Nintendo Entertainment System, so he bought a Game Boy but didn't have the money for any extra games, which put him on the path of playing Tetris , as it was included for free. [5]
He was one of the winners of the 1990 Nintendo World Championships, for which he was bestowed a Mario trophy, a $10,000 U.S. savings bond, a 1990 Geo Metro Convertible, a 40-inch rear-projection television, and a golden Mario trophy. [1] [2] [3] Soon after the competition, Camerica, a producer of unlicensed Nintendo Entertainment System games, signed a deal with Aackerlund to make him the official spokesman for their games. [2] Aackerlund then became the poster child for the game, featured in commercials and fairs. [6]
As a child, he felt pressured to play, as the prize money and endorsements were financially important for his family. [5] At the time, he was known as the only player to claim to have reached level 30 in Tetris. [6] Aackerlund soon disappeared from the scene but remained known as perhaps the most well-known name in Tetris prior to the domination of 7-time World Champion Jonas Neubauer. [7]
Aackerlund is a featured player in the 2011 documentary film Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters , which covers his second effort in competitive video gaming at the 2010 Classic Tetris World Championship.
Tetris is a puzzle video game created in 1985 by Alexey Pajitnov, a Soviet software engineer. It has been published by several companies for multiple platforms, most prominently during a dispute over the appropriation of the rights in the late 1980s. After a significant period of publication by Nintendo, in 1996 the rights reverted to Pajitnov, who co-founded the Tetris Company with Henk Rogers to manage licensing.
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Tetris is a puzzle video game developed and published by Nintendo for the Game Boy in 1989. It is a portable version of Alexey Pajitnov's original Tetris and it was bundled with the North American and European releases of the Game Boy itself. It is the first game to have been compatible with the Game Link Cable, a pack-in accessory that allows two Game Boy consoles to link for multiplayer purposes. A remaster, Tetris DX, was released on the Game Boy Color in 1998. A Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console version of Tetris was released in December 2011, lacking multiplayer functionality. The game was released on the Nintendo Switch Online service in February 2023.
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The Classic Tetris World Championship (CTWC) is a video game competition series, hosted by the Socal Gaming Expo. The competition launched in 2010, during the filming of Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters to determine the world's greatest Tetris player. Since 2021, the champion of each tournament has received the Jonas Neubauer Memorial Trophy, named after the seven-time record setting champion who died in 2021. In its first two years, the competition was held in Los Angeles, California, but was moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2012, and was held there annually through 2023. The 2024 edition will be held in Pasadena, California.
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