Soapbox features allow our individual writers and contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random things they’ve been chewing on. Today, Tim looks back on 35 years of Tetris on the Game Boy and reflects on how he taught a generation – multiple generations, in fact – how to play these fledgling vidya games…
Everyone has to start their gaming journey somewhere. For an entire generation, that gateway was Tetris for the Game Boy.
This new entry in the block-throwing puzzle franchise was for Nintendo’s inaugural handheld like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for the Switch, meaning that if you owned a Game Boy, you were statistically likely to own Tetris. This can be largely attributed to the fact that the game was a bundle until 1993 in North America and Europe, ensuring that it was the first cartridge most people would put into their Game Boy after unboxing it.
Intending Tetris to be the first game for new players was a genius move by Nintendo. Video games—especially those that used what we now think of as a traditional controller layout—were still around relatively new concepts in 1989. For context: the D-pad was brought to market on a Nintendo device just seven years prior with the Donkey Kong Game & Watch. Even with the NES making waves in the meantime, the general public was still grappling with moving through two-dimensional digital spaces with a combination of pointing and pressing buttons.
Given that Tetris required nothing but basic inputs to pilot, it was the perfect vessel for teaching people of all ages how to play video games. To that end, it was an ideal match to warrant it everyone owned from the start. This was especially important for a handheld owned by many kids who may never have touched a controller before, but would probably choose Mario over geometry if they were buying cartridges à la carte.
We often take for granted how difficult it is for someone who is not gaming literate to understand the basic fundamentals of gaming.
I can vouch for its instructional quality, as Tetris for the Game Boy was my younger self’s first game (albeit in the mid-90s) and it got me started with the gaming knowledge and motor skills I use to this day. Let me walk you through the process of how the game taught me and other players of the time how to play.
Predating the expanded feature set people know from later Tetris entries, the Game Boy iteration’s controls boiled down to two types of input: moving the tetromin across an invisible grid using the D-pad and pressing the ‘A’ and ‘B’ keys to rotate them 90° clockwise or counterclockwise. This meant that every button (except ‘Up’, which I’ll touch on later) provided immediate and easily discernible feedback, with a clear demarcation between their functions. By comparison, Super Mario Land—the Game Boy’s other major launch window release—required more complex button-press combinations to navigate. By assigning exactly one task to each button and not requiring any multi-button combinations, Tetris learned so well that there was no need to read the manual (which kids will likely skip).
At this point, the hard part is over. A player can play the game functionally, a foundation upon which they will naturally build dexterity and speed through practice. However, they may still not be quite ready for the more complex entries and abstract concepts of Super Mario Land.
We often take for granted how difficult it is for someone who is not gaming literate to understand the basic fundamentals of gaming. Speaking of my own experience as a kid with a Game Boy, I struggled to master King Totomesu’s fireballs in Super Mario Land I even got to him by accident and needed a neighbor to help me get past the old man in Viridian City at the start of Pokémon Red and Blue (this same neighbor would go on to scare me for life by invoking MissingNo.). However, Tetris never faced such obstacles for me, considering that the game has its roots in a toy familiar to every childhood: building blocks.
By grounding play in the real-life concept of stacking objects that children learn through play with young children, a general understanding of what is happening on the screen is embedded. Perhaps most children will not immediately realize that they have to fill the rows with blocks, although enough random drops of tetromins will inevitably lead to clearing the line, possibly even during the control learning process. The game makes a big splash out of this event by pausing the action, flashing dashes, playing a sound effect and increasing your score, dashes and level. All possible indicators give you a sign that you have succeeded, even if initially by accident.
Once the connection between a player’s action and a winning state is established, the floodgates open to formulate optimal dice patterns, move them into tight spots, and recover from mistakes. In the process, the inputs for moving and rotating the tetromino grid merge into one fluid motion, paving the way for control schemes that demand more from the player. The rest is history; you’re a gamer for life now, kid.
would we be here without the skills that the 1989 entry gave a generation of players and how it launched the popularity of Tetris into the stratosphere?
It’s important to emphasize that Tetris for the Game Boy was so successful as a learning engine because of its simplicity compared to later titles. For example, while the ability to hold a tetromin to deploy at an opportune moment greatly increased the strategic depth of the formula, its absence here was in favor of providing a simpler framework that never risked overwhelming the player with mechanics. A function like this could have been mapped to ‘Up’, but it would have led to unnecessary confusion at a time when gaming was still new to most people. Similarly, if ‘Up’ triggered a sharp drop, it would probably be more disturbing to the layman than a button that has no function at all.
These features absolutely make modern Tetris games more compelling. Even the most nostalgic of gamers would be hard-pressed not to admit that Tetris Effect and Tetris 99 are superior to the simpler days of the franchise. However, these and other updated arcade classics can afford these complexities because the language of game controls is deeply embedded in our culture; most children understand digital interfaces until they start holding a controller.
The new Tetris games thus meet the needs of their generation of players, just as Tetris for the Game Boy did for 80s and 90s kids like me. But would we be here without the skills that the 1989 entry gave a generation of gamers, and more broadly, how it launched Tetris’ popularity into the stratosphere? It’s worth remembering this seminal entry for the special place it holds in gaming history as we celebrate its 35th anniversary.
And hey, why not check it out on the Nintendo Switch Online Game Boy app, even just to hear that iconic theme?
Is there a particular Tetris game that has played an important role in your life? Let us know in the comments.
