#33: Tetris (Nintendo, Game Boy, 1989)

The NES version of Tetris is also not the version that the world at large remembers playing. Which is not to say that it wasn’t played by an awful lot of people; that is, after all, the reason that particular version is on our list. But the one that has eked out the largest space in the public consciousness, the canonical version of Tetris, if you like, is of course the version for Nintendo’s Game Boy. Tetris was not just one of only four titles (five in the US) available for the system at launch, it came packed in with every Game Boy sold. And that was a whole lot of Game Boys.

We’ve talked in the past about how the gaming industry in Europe at this time was a very different beast from its counterparts in America and Japan, but the Game Boy became the first games console to really bridge that gap. The choice between console and computer gaming, where Europe, on the whole, went one way, and the US went the other, boiled down to a choice between two broadly similar machines that plugged into your television and made it interactive. But the Game Boy offered something entirely different; the ability to take games with you to play during school breaks, during commutes to work, when you couldn’t get on the TV because Coronation Street was on, whatever. The Game Boy was absolutely huge (and not just in the physical sense). It is, to this day, the third best-selling system ever, both globally, and in Europe specifically.

And Tetris was a vital ingredient in that success. With its small, dimly lit screen in four shades of green, the Game Boy wasn’t winning any beauty contests, and the nature of portable gaming meant it needed a game that could be picked up and played in short bursts as easily as marathon sessions. A gap that the game slotted into so perfectly, it feels like it was created intentionally for Tetris to fill it, like blocks piled up with a gap of one square width, waiting for a straight piece to come along. If Tetris did not exist, Nintendo would have had to invent it.