Every year members of the popular gaming forum, GameFAQs (which is pronounced however you feel like) organise a competition of sorts between popular video game characters to see which one is the current darling of the collective internet and in 2007, that darling was the L Block from Tetris.
By the website’s own admission, the competition is little more than a glorified popularity contest with the individual abilities of a given character being secondary to how many people own a t-shirt with their face on it. Which is why character like Kratos, a man who has bested the entire pantheon of Greek Gods in a punching contest and Scorpion, an immortal hell wraith who can rip the still beating heart out of someone’s chest, consistently lose every year to this asshole.
While the competition is open to and often contains a remarkably diverse cast of gaming icons from the the last several decades of the medium, it is invariably won by the same small pool of character that the internet has a hard on for like Link from the Legend of Zelda series or Cloud from Final Fantasy 7. In regards to Link, he has won no less than 6 of these kinds of competition since 2002, proving rather definitively that people like sexy elf men.
In 2007, in an attempt to stop the battle being won by the same character for a third time, a GameFAQs user put forward the L Block from Tetris as a joke and people fucking loved it. After the L Block managed to somehow make its way past the first round of voting, users from across the internet began descended onto the forum determined to make the humble tetromino the champion. Voting only got more heated when it became apparent that to win, the L Block would have to beat both Link and Cloud.
Because there’s nothing the internet as a collective entity finds more nourishing than the impotent, empty threats of die-hard fans watching something they love being mocked, the L Block of course smashed the shit out of both Link and Cloud in their respective voting sections, leading to it ultimately being crowned the winner.
Sadly for the L Block, its time at the top was short-lived and subsequent attempts to make it or one of its blocky brothers win the next Character Battle competition. For the curious, the next three character battles were won by Link, Link and some dipshit from League of Legends. But never forget that for one, brief, but glorious moment, this was voted as the most popular character in gaming ever.
–
If you’re still hankering for more Tetris factoids, check out our article on the official Tetris sequel nobody ever talks about. Welltris.
