During the summer of 1992, between my first and second years at
university, I was working at a video game studio in Leamington Spa. We
were supposed to be coding a game called Tank Commander for the PC, a
long forgotten battle simulation – but one day someone brought in a Game
Link cable, which allowed the connection of two Nintendo Game Boy
consoles together. Of course, we immediately loaded up the Tetris
competitive mode, in which any lines you cleared on your own screen
would be cruelly transferred on to the bottom of your opponent's stack.
Work ground to a halt and didn't really start up again for several days.
Most gamers have Tetris addiction stories. Since Russian programmer
Alexey Pajitnov first developed the falling shape puzzler while working
at the Moscow Academy of Sciences, it has sold hundreds of millions of
copies on more than 50 different hardware platforms. Scientists and
designers have pondered over its incredible appeal, the extraordinary
compulsion people have to fit variously shaped tetriminos into a bucket.
The beauty of Tetris is its simplicity – you need to understand no
archaic conventions or rules of gaming. It is also essentially about
something that we all find intrinsically satisfying: tidying up. Tetris
is about imposing order, even if the task is Sisyphean, because the
shapes don't stop falling until your stack reaches the top of the
screen. And then it's all over. Tetris in the brain
The purity and popularity of the game have made it one of the most
researched and analysed on the planet. Countless papers have been
written on its cognitive effects. In 2009 research published in BioMed Central
suggested that playing Tetris could strengthen the neural networks in
the brain, perhaps even improving memory. In the same year, researchers
at Oxford University found that
Tetris could help reduce flashbacks in sufferers of post-traumatic
stress disorder. Most of us just joked about the "Tetris effect", the
worrying after-image of falling blocks behind our eyes and even in our dreams.
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Since
the original prototype was developed by Pajitnov on an ancient
Electronica 60 computer, the rights to the concept have been swapped,
fought over, brought and more-or-less stolen dozens of times. The
publishing history of the game is a complex puzzle in its own right (and
to find out more you should immediately watch the documentary Tetris: From Russia With Love).
There have been various attempts to update the recipe. 1989's Super
Tetris added a smart bomb, 2001 title Tetris Worlds brought in a story
mode(!), and introduced "hold" and "easy spin" mechanics. Later,
Electronic Arts toyed with the brand for a while, producing the decent
Tetris Blitz (which bought in an against-the-clock dynamic) before
blotting its copybook entirely by trying to add a subscription service to its iOS Tetris port. Tetris unbound
These were sort of interesting, but most players saw them for what
they were – rather desperate attempts to re-sell a concept that worked
fine in its cheaply and readily available traditional incarnations.
Although, if we're going to to get really into this, the four-player
mode in the Nintendo 64 title, Tetris 64, was pretty special, as was
crossover classic Tetris With Card Captor Sakura, by longtime Street
Fighter developer Arika. That company actually produced some of the
finest Tetris spin-offs in the form of its Tetris: The Grand Master
series. Here is expert player Jin8 besting Tetris Grand Master 3. It is
pretty incredible:
There were also lots of very good rivals, including Jay Geertsen's
Columns, later licensed by Sega for various platforms including the Game
Gear, the manufacturer's rival to Game Boy. Better though was the
gloriously kawaii Puyo Puyo series, originally from Japanese studio
Compile. Even Mario got in on the scene with 1990 title Dr Mario, which
replaced all the shapes with differently coloured pills in what was
clearly a tribute to acid house culture. (I'm kidding.)
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Now
another giant publisher, Ubisoft, has announced that it is working with
the Tetris Company – the organisation co-founded by Pajitnov that now
owns the right to the brand – to produce new versions for the Xbox One
and PlayStation 4. So far it has given nothing away about what these
games will look like or what new features will be added to take
advantage of these ultra powerful machines – but surely new modes and
functions will appear. What will they look like? Will it make use of the
console's connectivity to offer vast global leaderboards like Tetris Zone?
Will we see cloud support? A persistent massively multiplayer Tetris
arena, thousands of blocks wide, which a global audience must keep from
spilling over?
Perhaps there will be Tetris Kinect, where you shout, "turn it left,
no LEFT, now drop it, no not there, THERE!" Maybe Ubisoft will bring in
some of the epic narrative sweep of the Assassin's Creed series. It
turns out that this version of Tetris is being played in a vast national
security mainframe, and players have to hack the code to escape the
distopian nightmare. Are we going to get Tetris Rayman, the unlikely
combination of block-falling puzzler and Ubisoft's invisible-limbed
platforming mascot? Is there something in the Geneva convention that
could stop this from happening?
One thing is certain, while there are computers to play games on
there will be Tetris. It defies barriers of language and culture, it is
interactive entertainment in its purest form. Somehow, Pajitnov
discovered a hotwire to the brain; an experience that talked to the
central processing unit of human cognition in its own machine language.
And like the rest of the industry, despite following up with several
sequels, the puzzle-obsessed coder has not repeated the brilliance of
Tetris. But of course we should be reminded of the apocryphal story
about Joseph Heller. When told by an interviewer that, since Catch 22,
he had never managed to write anything as good, he replied, "No, but
then neither has anyone else". Pajitnov can quite securely make the same
claim.
