Tetris is perfection. It is not only one of the most important video games of all time, but, in my opinion, one of the greatest works of all time something of the past half century. Given the international reach of its influence, one could make a case for the game as the Soviet Union’s last great work of art. It is the epitome of interactive artistic design.
Tetris posits a simple vocabulary of seven differently shaped blocks of four units each, and an even simpler grammar: blocks fall, unit by unit, stack up at the bottom of the screen, and disappear if you manage to fill an entire row. From this premise emerge enchanting displays, infinite variations of moving symbols. Hundreds of different versions have appeared over the years Tetris released for any device that allows you to play a video game, but whatever twists in the rules or variations on the gameplay are included, the core is unchanged from what Alexey Pajitnov came up with all that time ago.
This year, the Tetris Company is celebrating the game’s 40th anniversary. In celebration, developer Digital has released Eclipse Tetris forever, a tribute game that includes 17 of those hundreds of versions in the third entry in its Gold Master Seriesthat has tested ways to develop games as documentaries. Tetris forever includes an interactive timeline that allows players to inspect primary documents such as photos and advertisements. It also features about an hour and a half of interviews with figures like Pajitnov and his longtime friend and collaborator Henk Rogers, who was key in bringing the game to consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy.
Tetris forever struggles with some of the same limitations as those of a traditional linear documentary, particularly accessibility issues. Digital Eclipse clearly found a great partnership between the Tetris Company and Rogers’ studio Blue Planet Software (formerly Bullet-Proof Software), evidenced by the fact that the majority of Tetris The included versions come from BPS. But there are also notable gaps. Despite how much time the game spends talking about the process by which Tetris came to platforms like the NES and Game Boy (both of which were crucial to its global distribution), neither version is playable here. There is so much Tetris beyond that, there’s a labyrinth of rights issues around and between them – it’s hard for a project like this to be anything close to comprehensive.
Still, within its limitations, Tetris forever works like a documentary game because each part of that descriptor informs the other. A player has complete freedom to navigate the timeline Tetris‘s development, spread and evolution, and they can play variations of the game that allow them to understand interviewees’ explanations of how Tetrises work. There is a remarkable recreation of Pajitnov’s original concept of the game from 1985, which, due to the vagaries of technological change, can only be played through these types of emulators. You can then go to one of the releases of, for example Bomblissthat is Tetris but with blocks that can blow up entire parts of the screen, or Hatris, a crazy variant from 1990 in which you stack hats on the heads of different characters, which Pajitnov developed together with his friend Vladimir Pokhilko. (One of the many stories sadly left out of this story is that of Pokhilko, who was the first to conduct psychological experiments on people playing the game, and who died in a murder-suicide in 1998.)
The overarching story of Tetris is distilled into the novelty of the game Tetris variant, Tetris time warp. It plays completely traditionally Tetris, except at certain times it will briefly switch to an earlier version, presenting the player with a challenge before returning to ‘the modern era’. You may get drawn into a game Bombliss with the task of detonating a large bomb, or being ordered to clear two lines in the air MS DOS version of Tetris. As this latest version shows, Tetris is endlessly malleable and yet always recognizable itself, the center of attraction of interactive art.
Tetris forever (2024) is now available on multiple platforms.
