Puyo Puyo Tetris is close to my heart, as it’s the game that showed my partner the joy of this medium. A few years ago, I gave her a controller and said ‘try this.’ Within a week or two, she was smashing my high scores and I was forced to actually think about Tetris on a strategic level. I’d always just played casually and relied on reflexes and improvisation, but that was no longer enough… Anyway, I got good at Tetris and we traded high scores until I raised the bar to a level she couldn’t reach. We moved on to multiplayer and had a lot of fun with that too.
Nowadays, we play Tetris 99 for our fix. In her words ‘once you’ve played 99 you can’t go back to local multiplayer.’ I don’t agree with that, but I know what she means and I’m grateful I’ve been able to introduce her to video games!
I’ve played Tetris GB, obviously, though not on Switch but… Game Boy.
I also have Tetris Effect, but that’s on PS4. I love games that do something interesting with music.
Tetris 99 is still peak modern Tetris for me, and one of the biggest and best surprises to come out of Nintendo this generation. Great to see Arika got a chance to be involved with Tetris again after Tetris TGM fell by the wayside.
Like Minasu I’ve played over half of these games, but it’s Tetris 99 that left the biggest impression.
After going on a Puyo Puyo kick earlier this year, where I played through all the games released in the Sonic Team era between Puyo Puyo Fever and Puyo Puyo 20th Anniversary, Puyo Puyo Tetris is no longer as enjoyable as it once was. It’s poorly balanced and the standalone modes for both Puyo Puyo are lacking. Cool crossover though and exactly what Puyo Puyo needed as 20th anniversary was a step back from 15th anniversary and 7, IMO.
Another one was just announced in the recent Nintendo Direct Partner Showcase
Unrivaled after four decades, Tetris Forever celebrates the original, genre-inspiring puzzle game that escaped from behind the Iron Curtain, onto the world stage, and into our cultural consciousness!
More than 15 playable classic games from the series’ history are featured, including many being released for the first time outside Japan. Battle your friends in the multiplayer cult favorite Tetris Battle Gaiden, create massive explosions to clear lines in Super Bombliss, and see where it all began in 1984 with an accurate recreation of the first version of Tetris on the Electronika 60 computer.
As the next release in Digital Eclipse’s acclaimed Gold Master Series, Tetris Forever includes over 90 minutes of all-new documentary footage exploring the lifelong friendship and creative partnership between Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov and The Tetris Company founder Henk Rogers, as they share the extraordinary but true story about Tetris.
And as this celebration wouldn’t be complete without an all-new Tetris experience, prepare to enter the… Tetris Time Warp! Up to four players will “warp” between different eras of Tetris in real time to experience a variety of classic graphic styles and play mechanics!
Also Nintendo announced that the NES port of Tetris is coming to Nintendo Switch Online.
If you’ve never tried the original Famicom port of Tetris that’s included in Tetris Forever, I highly recommend firing up an emulator and trying it out blind for a few minutes. The control scheme is… interesting to say the least.
It began over two weeks in 1985 and was reported as such in the copyright filing, books like Sheff’s “Game Over”, BBC documentary, Tetris patent, personal webpage of original programmer Vadim Garasimov, etc.
Then in 2009 at GDC the Tetris Company changed it to 1984, and hosted a 25th party. I’ve heard it said that it might have been to avoid a clash with the Mario anniversary which is also 1985. Or maybe it was because they couldn’t or didn’t want to go to GDC again in 2010.
Like matt mentioned, the most interesting thing about this collection is probably how they’ll frame the earliest Tetris historically. Learned a lot from that URL shared above, thanks!
And if we’re talking about 39/40 years of Tetris…a lot of that history is stuck in licensing hell, I feel the collection won’t have the breadth of coverage we usually see from Digital Eclipse. But maybe the depth of coverage on specific titles will be good.
Beyond the early origins of Tetris, though, it would be cool if they did cover games not featured in the collection, but I’m not holding my breath!
Yeah I’m not a fan of these collections so far because by their very nature they don’t include everything and that makes them almost a licence to rewrite history.
The Karateka collection didn’t include the best looking Atari ST version, a shame because it is on par with their modern remake.
Jeff Minter collection didn’t include his most lauded game: T3K. Or his best games (iOS and PocketPC)
I get there are licensing and technical constraints, but there’s no excuse for writing a version of history that is known to be incomplete or simply incorrect.
Personally I’d love to see them include two of the best versions: WonderSwan Color Tetris and Pokémon Mini Shock Tetris
Atari 50, The Making of Karateka and Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story all cover and mention games that aren’t included in the collection, so I wouldn’t be surprised if lots of games don’t at least get box art and a blurb.
Notably, the Llamasoft collection includes a timeline of every single software Jeff developed, with screenshots and descriptions
Super Bombliss (Bullet-Proof Software - Super Famicom)
Super Bombliss DX (Bullet-Proof Software - Game Boy Color)
Tetris Battle Gaiden (Bullet-Proof Software - Super Famicom)
Super Tetris 2 + Bombliss (Bullet-Proof Software - Port unconfirmed, probably Super Famicom)
Super Tetris 2 + Bombliss - Gentei Han (Bullet-Proof Software - Super Famicom)
Super Tetris 3 (Tose/Bullet-Proof Software - Super Famicom)
So this collection consists almost entirely of Super Famicom Tetris games developed and/or published by BPS. They really should have tried to just frame this as a Bullet-Proof Software story rather than a Tetris story.
Something interesting about this, the collection includes a “1984 version” of Tetris that doesn’t have a title screen and a 1985 version that does. The 1984 version also doesn’t have scoring for line clearing, and only scores based on how fast you drop the pieces.
