[dzdt]

My childhood claim to fame with tetris was to get a negative score on the windows 3.1 version. It turned out the points were stored in a 16 bit integer and wrapped to negative values above 32767.

For sure in that version the "hypertap" approach was superior to holding down the arrow keys. Even with the highest repeat key settings in windows you could get more moves per second by tapping.

[httpsterio]

At least in classic tetris and a few other games this has to do with controller polling. If I remember correctly it polls the controller at 30 or 60hz so you'd get the commands in at just before the frame redraws if you're tapping at that speed. I dunno about key repearters though.

[rzzzt]

Quadrapassel, a Linux/GNOME variant of the game suffered from this problem as well at one point. These games should look at raw key presses instead of relying on high-level keyboard repeat functionality.