Tetris is a concept which had a beginning, as all things do. There was a time before Tetris, which it is tempting to think of as an unfilled well. There was a time before Tetris in my life, too. There must have been. And yet I don’t remember even a personal beginning to Tetris. I don’t remember the process of learning Tetris. I am fairly sure I must have played the Windows version first, with the colourful scribble backgrounds and the cyan square blocks, but when I think of even that version I can only think that it was, already, Tetris, a thing that was there and not a new thing to be learned. It wears its complexity so lightly that it vanishes in the distance, erased like a completed line of blocks.
[Tetris, Microsoft, Windows, 1990]
Tetris is a set of pieces and rules. Part of its brilliance is in how it runs the classic simple to understand to difficult to master scale in such neat increments. Its tetromino blocks come in five different shapes, and (with two reflected) there are seven different possible pieces. Seven things is a nice number to get your head around. If you can keep in mind seven pieces, then surely it’s not too much to keep in mind nineteen different permutations once you add in all of the rotations? And if you can keep in mind nineteen permutations, then it is but one more step to keep in mind all of the different ways they can interact…
Tetris is the killer app. Tetris is the game which took the new freedom of portable gaming and demonstrated its use. A few minutes on the bus or the toilet? Tetris is there to make the time disappear or to give you something to focus on as you wish. I never had a Game Boy, and on my friends’ I played Super Mario Land, but I later played enough Nokia dropping-object-matching games on train journeys to recognise the utility of what Tetris set up. As the packaged Game with the Boy, it was perfect.
Tetris is instantly recognisable and alive with possibility. You can turn it into a board game (really, that happened). You can turn it into a synaesthetic meditation on the interconnectedness of all things and the nature of flow-state concentration, complete with banging electronic pop music, and that will work too. Three decades or so of time passed just means more time for associations and memories to build up to make it work more.
[Tetris Effect, Enhance Inc., PlayStation 4, 2018]
Tetris is the piece that can slide into a gap as it emerges. A craze for multiplayer games where you take on large numbers of players at once, players slowly whittled down to a final few? Tetris can do that, too. In fact it’s a return to its original conception by Alexey Pajitnov and colleagues as a puzzle game for more than one player, tetromino tennis.
[Tetris 99, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, 2019]
Tetris is not going away, in other words. Its longevity is built into its structure from the beginning. More than any other game we’ve seen so far, it is not just remembered for iconic images or moments, but remembered in its entirety.
Tetris is astonishingly reducible and expandable and, yes, portable as a result of this way that it can be cut and remixed and entirely preserved all the while.
Tetris is small enough to be easily grasped but holds a whole world.
Tetris is Tetris.
[Uncharted is an occasional feature where I look at games which were massively successful but, for whatever reason, were not eligible for the charts so could not possibly have made my list of #1 games. In this case it is because Tetris was included with the Game Boy rather than sold separately]