There is, at any given moment, someone on Twitch playing Tetris before a live audience.

On a recent Thursday night, the star attraction was a 14-year-old named Michael Artiaga, better known by his handle Dog, who is the 2020 and 2021 world champion on a game nearly three times his age. His hands moved across a narrow Nintendo controller with the breeziness of a cocktail pianist as he stacked the game’s familiar falling shapes and cleared one row after another. From time to time, he reached forward to take a bite of a sandwich.

In less than 10 minutes, Artiaga amassed points and reached levels that were inconceivable during the first 25 years of the game’s existence. The announcer — yes, these games have announcers — sounded appropriately flabbergasted.

“An absolute professional at this game, my god,” he said.

Across the hall from Artiaga’s bedroom in the family home in Fort Worth, was one of his main challengers for world Tetris supremacy — his brother, Andy, 16, who finished second in the Classic Tetris World Championships in 2020 and third this year.

“It’s so much different than other games,” Michael said. “There’s a lot of quick thinking and comprehension. That’s what interests me.”

The emergence of the Artiaga brothers continues a trend that has been developing in tournament Tetris in recent years. Interest in vintage video games has been growing, and applications for entry to the Classic Tetris World Championships, contested each year since 2010, have been increasingly steadily. Certainly nostalgia is part of the reason.

But tournament organizers have noticed something else: The competitors are getting younger.

For almost a decade, the undisputed world’s greatest Tetris player was a California man named Jonas Neubauer. He became the focal point of a 2011 documentary, “Ecstasy of Order,” about a small group of highly skilled, slightly obsessive competitive Tetris players. In it, several players discuss the “Tetris Effect,” in which they imagine they see falling Tetris pieces while they’re doing things other than actually playing Tetris — showering, driving and so on.

The film culminated with a tournament, the inaugural Classic Tetris World Championships, which determined the world’s greatest “Tetris Master” on a vintage Nintendo Entertainment System console. Neubauer won, the first of his seven titles in the next eight years.

At least some of the competitors, including Neubauer, seemed in on the joke. They were children of the nineties who grew up playing the game on Game Boys and PCs and, once a year, flocked to Portland to fire up the old Nintendo for a Classic Tetris tournament nobody heard about.

Then everything changed. In 2018, Neubauer, then 37, lost in the championship finals to a 16-year-old named Joseph Saelee. To the sport of competitive Tetris, it was a Buster Douglas moment.

“He was so young,” said Sean Ritchie, 31, a Tetris competitor since 2010. “He held the controller in a funky way. He didn’t play like a normal being. He was like an alien.”

Saelee’s victory was also a win for the YouTube generation. The video of his upset has since been viewed more than 17 million times, and a replay was aired on ESPN2 while sports were shut down during the pandemic.

Saelee’s manner of straddling the length of the controller with his fingers was so unorthodox it spawned a new name, “hyper-tapping.” Vince Clemente, who co-produced the 2011 Tetris documentary, compared Saelee’s grip to the Fosbury Flop, the backward-over-the-bar style that revolutionized the high jump. Other competitors couldn’t believe what they were witnessing.

“We saw this kid do what he did, and we all had the same collective thought,” Ritchie said. “We have been playing this game wrong for 30 years.”

But hyper-tapping was just a hint of what was to come.

‘The perfect e-sports game’

Just about everyone knows what Tetris is. It was created in 1984 by a Russian computer programmer, Alexey Pajitnov. The point of Tetris, to the extent it has one, hasn’t changed: Game pieces in seven different shapes, each made up of four squares, drop from the middle of the screen. The player has to clear “lines” by steering the pieces into place so that they cover the width of the playing screen, 10 squares wide. Pieces can be moved or flipped as they fall, but once they land, they’re stuck. As players advance, the pieces fall faster, and if lines aren’t cleared quickly enough, they stack up to the top of the screen and the game is over.

For most people, the game lasts a matter of minutes. But the rhythm and efficiency with which skilled Tetris players manage their “stacks” is mesmerizing.

“I think Tetris is the perfect e-sports game,” Clemente said. “It’s simple to follow, easy to understand. You play along in your mind as the players are playing and you say, ‘Oh, I would do the same thing.’ Yeah, right.”