"Do androids dream of electric sheep?"[1]
Tetris is a beautifully simple game that takes seconds to understand as it is built from such simple rule set. Blocks made of four square bricks fall into a bucket and you must place them into the bucket. If you can make a connected line, horizontally, spanning from one wall to the other, that line will disappear. And that is that.
Making blocks and lines disappear is surprisingly compelling and the "clear up" mechanic is one that is common in many games actually - it makes you feel victorious. But that is not really enough to sustain a game of this magnitude and so you need a risk/reward mechanic that provides a bit more. And Tetris has that bit more to make compelling into compulsive.
Each line disappearing gives you some points, and as you clear more and more lines, the speed at which new blocks fall increases - though each line at this higher level is now worth more points. The more lines you can make disappear in one action (or "drop") will give you more points so removing the most lines in one go - four - will get you the most points[2] but to do that, you needed to set the board up to be ready for the "stick" block. This would make your blocks taller than they would otherwise need to be so you had to balance it off.
4 square blocks gives 7 combinations so, using the simplest of probability calculations, there was a 1 in 7 chance (assuming random distribution) that you would get the stick. It was a bit risky at higher levels to go for that but at lower speeds, there was plenty of time to organise carefully. Tetris is all about numbers but, like Sudoku, it is not so much about numbers as mental dexterity.
In 1989, Nintendo released the Gameboy which allowed games to be played on the go[3], away from the TV screen, and revolutionised toilet time for evermore. And Tetris was an absolutely perfect match for the machine with its ability to be played in monochrome and the nature of its compulsion. There have been many more versions of Tetris on almost all machines that are capable of playing games but this is the default classic. It had a great soundtrack which fit perfectly the repetitive and compulsive nature of the game using chiptune renditions of Russian songs. There is not a lot you can change in Tetris but changes have been applied again and again in terms of the graphics, the speed, the sound, some extra features but everything feels right on the Gameboy from the single "next" tile to the drop speed when you push down (later instant drops just did not feel right for me) and most importantly the slight delay when a line disappears to give you a split second to reappraise your situation.
There were a spate of single screen puzzle games in the wake of Tetris' success that seemed to do very well from major manufacturers. Nintendo themselves had Dr Mario on the Gameboy, Sega tried with Columns (for the Game Gear), Taito were pretty successful with the Puzzle Bobble series [4] and then, eventually there was some form of completeness with the release of Lumines on the Playstation Portable. This was also made up of blocks, music and a clear up mechanic but a much more modern take on it with the ability to have high fidelity music and more colours than I can even comprehend and beat-matched timing which has gone on to spawn multiple sequels. It is probably my second most played puzzle game and the Tetris feel is very strong in it.
Tetris is famously addictive and is said to affect even our dreams. I don't dream much, but even I can admit that I have seen those blocks and heard the music in my sleep.
3 other T titles that might be interesting:
Tekken 2 - Street Fighter accessibility for the PlayStation era made this easy and fun to play for everyone.
Time Crisis - Namco, and PlayStation, could match Sega for a while and the light gun for this was just superb.
Tomb Raider - A pop culture phenomenon from the Sega Saturn, originally. Ended up being a PlayStation poster girl.
2. I always knew this as "a tetris", as did most people I knew at the time but this may not have been official. Did everyone know it as that?↩
3. The Gameboy was by far the most successful of a few handheld devices to be released at a similar time - the Sega Game Gear, the Atari Lynx and the PC Engine GT. The Gameboy should not have been the winner, per the analysis of the time, as it was the only handheld to be non-colour (green and grey) but the benefit of that was that it was also the only one that was portable both in terms of size and battery life. And as everyone knows, gameplay is king. Later handhelds came and went such as the Neo Geo Pocket and the Bandai Wonderswan but it was not until the Playstation Portable in 2004 that Nintendo had any real competition in the handheld space.↩
4. Puzzle Bobble was so named as it was a puzzle game featuring the characters, Bub and Bob, from the Taito legend, Bubble Bobble. Puzzle Bobble was inexplicably called Bust-A-Move in the UK which in turn meant that the early music/dance game classic Bust-A-Move had to be retitled to Bust-A-Groove. I have strong, and good, memories of both games. Bust-A-Groove had a brilliant two player dance off mode which, although I was terrible at it, was superb fun and was one of the first music games around (along with Parappa the Rapper and Beatmania). It also had a very fun cast of characters and music selection - at a time when music games, and games in general, had original music. Puzzle Bobble was something I had on the PS1 while I was at university and in my first year, we had a communal kitchen area (shared amongst ten) that was at the front of the halls so people would see it as they walked past. For a while, I had set my PlayStation up downstairs and a girl, a stranger, came in to start playing. I think she was Japanese but I cannot be sure. She came in, destroyed everyone whilst wearing a constant smile and then we never saw her again.↩
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