When I first got my Gameboy, it came with a copy of Tetris, but if I’m honest, it wasn’t something I was particularly interested in at the time. The only time I really played it was when we got a link cable for the Gameboy and we went to my grandparents who also had a Gameboy with Tetris where we could play the versus mode. It was amazing because you got to play as Mario and Luigi!
Today, however, I appreciate Tetris a bit more and even though there have been numerous iterations and variations since that copy on the Gameboy, it’s that one that will always have a place in my mind.
Tetris was originally created by Alexey Pajitnov in 1985, when he was inspired by the difficulty of packing pentominoes back into a box. As part of his work as a speed recognition researcher he was tasked with testing the capabilities of the computers that they had, to this end he developed the skills to write Tetris. Some time after its release on other consoles it became the subject of a licensing issue as Nintendo scrambled to licence it to package with the Gameboy, ultimately succeeding and providing the console with its first killer game.
It feels a bit unnecessary to describe the premise as it's so well known, but assuming you've never touched a games console before or perhaps this blog has been found on some last server long after mankind has ended, I'll do so anyway. Various tiles or tetrominoes of all different shapes fall down from the top of the screen and it's up to you to line them up. When you make a line, it disappears and the lines above it drop down. More points are given when you clear multiple lines at a time, but the more you clear, the faster the tetrominoes fall, making it harder to manoeuvre them into position. As simple as that premise is, the execution is much harder. Still, if you do really well, you get an animation of a rocket to appear which, to this day, I've never been able to achieve.
Thankfully, I can console myself with the soundtrack created by Hirokazu Tanaka that is as well known as the game. The mere suggestion of the game is enough to invoke that iconic score.
There's something soothing about playing Tetris, as tense as it may be when you're playing at the top of the screen desperately trying to hang on. It's a sense of bringing order and neatness that's so innately satisfying that to this day you could pick up a copy and still play for a good few hours without even realising it.
It's for that reason that Tetris is one of the most recognised and timeless games and why it will always have a place in my heart, even though I'm not very good at it.