I play a lot of Tetris 99.

I am decent at it. I am not “win the lobby” decent.

So I had a perfectly reasonable thought:

What if my computer played it for me, on the real Switch, pressing the real buttons?

Three days later I had:

• a robot that finishes in the top 10 against 98 real humans
• an Arduino that introduces itself to Nintendo hardware under a false name
• a Tetris coach that draws on top of my own live games
• three confident theories about why things were broken, all of them wrong
• soldered exactly three header pins, badly

This is the story, with drawings.