Tetris Is Tetris. It’s basically perfect, and always has been. This becomes clear when you load the first playable game in the new interactive documentary and retro game compilation Tetris forever: the original Tetrisas was the case on the Electronika 60 computer, which was already old-fashioned when Alexey Pajitnov wrote the game in Russia in 1984. The text is entirely in Cyrillic, the blocks consist of brackets (the Electronika 60 had no graphics function). all), the only color is green, and the game lacks some design improvements, such as the score multiplier for clearing multiple lines at once. And yet, as crude as it is, the game is as instantly and wildly playable as it is intuitive and as deeply satisfying as any version since. It is a work of pure genius.
The chance to try out this epochal piece of software for yourself is the greatest privilege we are granted Tetris foreverthat collects just a small handful of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of iterations of Pajitnov’s game from the last four decades. The most powerful revelation contained in the collection is the immediate, first-hand realization that almost everything that matters Tetris great was present in these early lines of code. Thereafter, Tetris forever Developer Digital Eclipse can go both anywhere and nowhere.
Image: Digital solar eclipse
Tetris forever is the latest in Digital Eclipse’s Gold Master Series, a format that bundles professionally emulated classic games with tons of multimedia information presented in an interactive timeline: filmed interviews, archival videos, documentaries, artwork, photographs and more. It’s officially the third entry in the series, following the single-title deep dive The emergence of karateka
TetrisThe tangled publishing history is a double-edged sword for Digital Eclipse. It makes for a compelling story, but also makes putting together a definitive compilation of playable versions of the game an impossible task. Meanwhile the story is told by the versions Are This includes the successive talented game designers, including Pajitnov, who searched in vain for a way to improve upon perfection.
The behind-the-scenes story is the stuff of video game legends: a game developed behind the Iron Curtain in the final days of the Cold War becomes the subject of an intriguing legal battle involving the USSR, Nintendo, and shady British media barons a privateer entrepreneur named Henk Rogers. The story even has a happy ending, with Rogers and Pajitnov forming an unlikely relationship, solidifying the rights and settling the game’s future while making cash for the rest of the time.
Image: Digital solar eclipse
It’s also a story that has been told many, many times before – in one Classics of business journalism, a solid BBC documentaryand a pretty silly biopic, to name just three. Still, the familiarity of the story shouldn’t detract from the material Digital Eclipse has assembled to tell it. There’s plenty of time for interviews with Rogers and Pajitnov, as well as expert testimony from a number of luminaries, including Tetris effect
What really stands out Tetris forever from these more conventional interpretations of the Tetris Story is his commitment to following the development of the game itself through countless editions on every platform imaginable. But while all major variations of Tetris mentioned (and a few more), publishing rights are so scattered throughout history that there is no way for Digital Eclipse – or even Rogers and Pajitnov’s rights holder, The Tetris Company, who obviously worked closely together on this release – to They include many of these playable versions.
Nintendo, which is as fiercely protective of its back catalog titles as ever, has not relinquished the rights to any of its titles Tetris Variants of the project. This means that these are probably the two final versions of Tetris – the iconic Game Boy Tetriswhich found the perfect match of form and function, and NES Tetriswhich is still the gold standard in competition Tetris play – are not included. (The Game Boy game is available on Nintendo Switch Online, and the NES game too will be added to the offering this winter
Image: Digital solar eclipse
And that’s just the gist. It’s annoying to have to ignore the brief mention of a fascinating oddity like the Philips CD-i Tetriswith its distant new-age vibes and impeccable 1992 screensaver aesthetic, without being able to see it in action, let alone play it. (For an authoritative and entertaining overview of some of the games omitted here Tetris foreverI recommend this One-hour video by John Linneman of Digital Foundry which visits nearly 30 versions of the game.) In recent years, two of the most important and interesting reinventions of the game have emerged – Tetris 99 And Tetris effect – but as current commercial titles they don’t fall into this collection either.
Instead, the game consists of a collection consisting largely of the versions that Rogers’ own Bullet Proof Software released in Japan in the 1980s and 1990s: the 1988 Famicom release (not to be confused with Nintendo’s NES game), Tetris 2 + BomBliss series and the cute Versus game Tetris Battle Gaiden. There are a few relevant departures from the Bullet Proof catalog, like the Famicom Go game that endeared Rogers to then-Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi, and Pajitnov’s charming but rather moronic sequel Hatris.
There are valuable things in here. Fight Gaiden is still one of the best multiplayer versions of TetrisAnd BomBliss (from Earthbound Designer Akihiko Miura) is one of the more successful attempts to evolve the game by introducing bombs that can be detonated by completing lines. But the best these designs can do is limit dilution of purity Tetris. BomBliss is very good – especially in its puzzling puzzle mode – but even such a well-done variant feels like a regular, run-of-the-mill puzzle game that’s somehow cheesy and simplistic when placed next to the monolithic, flawless genius of its parent.
Image: Digital solar eclipse
Digital Eclipse’s own contribution is a new game, Tetris time jumpwhich has a fun gimmick: every time the player clears 10 rows, a time warp block falls, transporting the player back to an earlier era Tetris: the Electronika 60 version, a cheeky facsimile of the Game Boy Tetrisa 16-bit BomBlissand so forth. If you complete a timed challenge within the time loop, you will receive a large score bonus before returning to the modern day. There’s a decent, pleasantly chaotic multiplayer version of Time jump that also supports up to four players.
Tetris is definitely forever. You can’t blame Digital Eclipse for wanting to commemorate this, or Rogers and Pajitnov for taking another victory lap, this time in interactive form. This game will always be worth studying and celebrating.
But Tetris is also too perfect to evolve over time, too large to summarize in a compilation, and too pure to require explanation. Rotate, drop, click, repeat. Everything is there in the first five seconds. The rest is just lines that need to be deleted.
Tetris forever was released on November 12th on Atari VCS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on Switch using a pre-download code provided by Digital Eclipse. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These have no influence on the editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find More information about Polygon’s ethics policy can be found here.
