Apart from being a known technical wizard, having helped found Apple, Steve Wozniak is also apparently a pretty amazing Tetris player. He used to play Tetris on the original Game Boy and has in the past let loose that he did use to submit his scores to Nintendo Power.
Nintendo Power was a video game news and strategy podcast for the United States and Canada, where they also printed game high scores. The magazine started originally in August 1988 as Nintendo’s official print magazine and lasted for 24 years of production, making it one of the longest ever run gaming magazines in North America.
The final issue was released on December 11, 2012, and that looked like the end of Nintendo Power, however, in 2017 it returned as an online podcast.
Well, Steve Wozniak was an amazing Tetris player, potentially one of the best ever. From 1988 onwards he was always ranked #1 in their high score section. In fact, he was ranked #1 so much that Nintendo Power told him they would no longer print his name in the magazine. But Wozniak had a plan, he couldn’t lose his number one spot like this! So he decided to spell his name backwards and submitted it along with a photo of his high score: Evets Kainzow.
He even changed his city to Saratoga instead of Los Gatos, and then he forgot about the joke. On the next issue of the magazine, he initially thought a foreign kid had broken his record! Then he remembered that he had submitted his name backwards. Wozniak released this information during an interview with Gizmodo, which had most of the internet calling out his bluff.
But Reddit users quickly responded with photos of the actual Nintendo Power issue, and it did indeed have Evets Kainzow on the #1 high score spot for Tetris. His score? 546,145 points. Today’s world records are in the millions, but at the time this was considered an extremely high score.
