Tetris

From Board 8 Wiki

Tetris is a puzzle game most popular in its Game Boy and NES version, but which has been ported in one version or another to pretty much every gaming console or handheld in existence. Tetris is the most-played game in GameFAQs history, with over 97.36% of the site having played the game at one time or another according to a 2005 poll result. Only Super Mario Bros. 3 even approaches that level of popularity on the site's all-time playrate rankings.

Despite a large Round One victory (well, it was only playing Pong, after all), the classic puzzle game didn't exactly set the world on fire during the 2004 Game Contest. In R2 Zelda 1 pounded Tetris with nearly 75% of the vote, resulting in a pretty poor x-stat ranking.

But Tetris' true time to shine arrived in 2007, when the four-way nature of the Character Battle allowed classic "character" L-Block to survive long enough to first become a Board 8 fad (R2), then a site-wide meme (R3), and finally an internet phenomenon from the Elite Eight onwards. In the Championship Match Blocky used the combined power of joke votes, anti-Nintendo/Square domination votes, and old-school Tetris nostalgia to defeat Link, Cloud, and Snake outright, earning GameFAQ's most-played game its first Contest Championship (...sort of).