Believe me when I say: I really thought I knew the history of Tetris. The puzzle game’s journey from behind the Iron Curtain in 1980s Moscow to multi-million-selling video game has been the subject of countless articles, a very entertaining book and a recent movie. I’ve been playing Tetris in various forms for over 30 years, from Game Boy to Nintendo Switch, even in virtual reality. So when I loaded up Tetris Forever, an interactive documentary about the 40-year history of Tetris from the developer-archivers at Digital Eclipse, I wasn’t expecting to learn anything new. I was tested very mistaken.
Did you know about Hatris, the sequel to 1990’s Tetris that involved stacking colorful hats on top of heads? I did it, vaguely, but I did it. No Meet the semi-authorized twist on that game released by Spectrum Holobyte the same year, a slightly terrifying swap-and-drop puzzler in which players stacked mouths, noses, and eyes to try to make human faces. They called him Caras…tris III, suggesting that whoever named him gave up halfway. No wonder it wasn’t a success. I didn’t know that Henk Rogers, the charismatic Dutch-American who played a major role in turning Tetris into a global phenomenon, spent his student years surfing and diving in Hawaii before (in his words) chasing a girl to Japan and coding the game. country code. first best-selling role-playing game in 1984.
Tetris Forever is made up of five chapters, presented as timelines with an absolute treasure trove of images and videos from Tetris’ 40-year history, and faithful, playable recreations of the game showing how it has evolved since Alexey Pajitnov coded the game as something to entertain yourself while working at the Moscow computer research center. It’s at least a good four hours of material. There is camcorder footage of Henk’s famous visit to Moscow, where he appeared unauthorized at a Russian government building to fight for the publishing rights to Tetris on the Game Boy. There are fascinating images of Nintendo of America in the 1980s and photographs of Henk and Pajitnov with the famously difficult to impress former Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi, with whom Rogers struck up a fruitful business friendship over games of Go.
In addition to the 15 playable versions of Tetris throughout its history, the game’s boxes, advertisements and marketing materials are digitally recreated in perfect detail for you to examine and explore. And of course, there’s plenty of on-camera interview footage, not just of Rogers and Pajitnov, but also of other people who played a role in the Tetris story.
What emerges here is a much more complete picture of the history of Tetris than the Apple TV movie, which glossed over many details, especially about the four-party dispute over the rights to Tetris in the 1980s. spare no detail. It is true that this does It turns the second and third chapters into a sort of shaggy dog story, as we hear every last detail, but when it comes to the game’s story, this detail is important even when it threatens to be boring. All of this paints a very interesting portrait of the games industry in the 1980s, which in the United States and Europe was truly a Wild West of enthusiastic coders and entrepreneurs (often programmers themselves) buying games everywhere and, Sometimes they became very rich. outside of them. This is in stark contrast to the situation in Japan, whose gaming scene was dominated by a few rigidly traditional companies with enormous respect for the process, and of course with Russia and the Soviet Union, where it was outright prohibited to do any kind of business dealings with a foreign company.
This may all sound incredibly nerdy and, well, it is: Digital Eclipse makes super comprehensive reissues that really respect the history of the games involved. Tetris Forever is not a documentary for the general public, but for people with a great interest in the history of video games. Meanwhile, the playable versions of Tetris and other connected games are impressively faithful, but obviously the versions that everyone In fact wants to play (the Game Boy and NES versions) remain under Nintendo’s control. For what it’s worth, Tetris Effect is still, in my opinion, the best version of Tetris: it was created by Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the famous Japanese synesthetic music game developer, who also appears a lot in this documentary.
Tetris has become timeless, and there’s something almost spiritual about playing a recreation of its first version, made for the Electronika 60 computer with brackets and exclamation points lined up on a flickering black-and-green screen. Playing it, I feel a small echo of what I feel when I look at the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum. It’s an amazing thing, a rare example of a perfect game that, despite all the drama described in this documentary and all the versions over the years, remains largely unchanged after 40 years.