Tetris Forever

“Tetris is a perfect game.” That’s a statement I’ve probably said a million times over the last 35 years. And it’s not just that it’s a perfect game, but I have long argued that Tetris started perfect and has only gotten worse over the years. Now, after playing Tetris Forever, I can say with absolute certainty that I have been wrong all this time. While I still contend that Tetris is, in fact, a perfect game, it definitely didn’t start that way, and playing the earliest iterations dating all the way back to 1984 ended up being a real eye-opener for me. This is just one of many revelations I had while matching horizontal lines in Tetris Forever, the much-anticipated new compilation from Digital Eclipse. After showing us the rotoscoping process in The Making of Karateka and diving deep into Llamasoft’s history, the Gold Master Series is heading to Soviet Russia to tell the story of Tetris, one of the single most influential video games of all time. Find out what other revelations surprised me when I review Tetris Forever by Digital Eclipse.

The nice thing is that Tetris Forever is a compilation based around Tetris, a game that needs no introduction. Be it on the Game Boy, PlayStation or a Chicken McNugget, everybody has played (or at least seen) Tetris. And if you’ve played Tetris, then you probably also know that it was originally made in Soviet-era Russia by a young math wiz named Alexey Pajitnov on his rudimentary Electronika 60 computer. But, as it turns out, the making of Tetris is just a small part of a much larger (and crazier) story, full of misunderstandings, shady deals, last-second agreements and lawsuits.

And that’s the big twist! For as much as this is the rise of Tetris, it’s also the story of Bullet-Proof Software, a small independent game developer founded by a charismatic Dungeons & Dragons fan. His name is Henk Rogers, and he’s the real star of this documentary. Although originally from the Netherlands, Henk moved to Hawaii to study computer science before eventually taking residence in Japan, where he became a game designer. If it feels like Henk has butted his way into this review out of nowhere, then that’s not far off from what happened in real life. Through a combination of being at the right place at the right time and sheer perseverance, Henk will forever be intertwined in the history of Tetris.

Through a number of extremely interesting documentary interviews and videos, we experience every step of the process from both Alexey and Henk’s point of view. We see how Alexey stumbles onto the idea and refines it into the Tetris that we know and love today. We sympathize with him as he navigates a games industry that is literally foreign to him, and how a simple miscommunicated email can forever change the trajectory of his career. We’re there as Henk uses the board game Go to build a working relationship with Nintendo, which leads to a truly captivating story where he’ll stop at nothing to track down Alexey to secure the licensing rights. Every twist and turn in the saga is discussed at length with (some of) the people who were there.

What’s really exciting is that we get to see the footage from Henk’s camcorder, which he seemingly took everywhere. Some of it is as mundane as chatting with a Russian interpreter while in a taxi or watching Henk use his portable TV in a hotel room, but even this leads to great stories about how he introduced Alexey to the Famicom version of Tetris. This incredible footage allows us to tag along when Henk goes to Russia, goes to the Consumer Electronics Show and goes to the Nintendo of America headquarters. If you’re a fan of Nintendo history, then you’re going to love the tour that he takes, which includes going through the offices and seeing the people manning the help line. You won’t believe some of the footage we get to see in this documentary.

It’s just so incredibly easy to get sucked into this story because Henk Rogers is one hell of a storyteller. He could be talking about something as boring as contract negotiations, and yet you’ll be on the edge of your seat waiting to see what happened next. It won’t take you very long to understand how he could talk his way into not only working with Nintendo and securing the rights to Tetris, but also how he could convince Hollywood to make a movie about the whole thing. He’s a great talker and salesman, and you’ll be under his spell the whole damn time. Sure, he’s probably embellishing some of the history for dramatic effect, but you won’t care. He’s that good.

In fact, Henk is so good that he almost overshadows the actual games that come in this package. I mean, you can play the 18 games at any time, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll put off playing them to find out what happens next in the story. The good news is that once you finally dive into the game catalog, there’s a lot of great stuff to discover.

One thing I learned right away is that it’s hard to go back to the earliest version of Tetris. The Electronika 60 version looks cool and finds a neat way to turn simple text into the iconic Tetris pieces, but some of the best parts of the game didn’t show up until several years later. I’m specifically talking about the scoring system, which wasn’t based on clearing lines, but rather dropping blocks. This, along with some control issues, makes it hard to go back to the first few iterations. They’re fun to visit and see how the series evolved in those first few years, but I have a hunch that the Tetris games that came out after 1988 will get more play in most households. Earning high scores from clearing a bunch of lines at once is just more addictive, and it’s one of the reasons the game was so popular in the first place.

A lot of the fun of the package is seeing how Tetris evolves from the early days into the addictive masterpiece we know and love today. We see them try to expand on the gameplay through sequels and Super Tetris, which is an off-shoot that also had a number of sequels. We’re also introduced to Bombliss, a knock-off so similar that they decided to package it with Tetris before allowing it to go out on its own. As we learn from the documentary portion of the package, many of these iterations were designed by developers who would go on to make games as diverse as Pokémon and Earthbound.

Alot of what we get in this package tends to be the Bullet Proof Software games that they were able to publish in Japan, independent from Nintendo (who published a lot of the Tetris games in North America and Europe). This means that we get to play Henk’s version of Go he programmed for the Famicom to win over Nintendo’s head honcho, a notorious Go lover. We also get to play three different versions of Hatris, Alexey’s follow-up and one of several iterations on the “Swap and Drop” template. One of my favorite games in the package is Tetris Battle Gaiden, a competitive Tetris game for the Super Famicom that mixes the classic puzzle elements with magic and counter moves. It has a great sense of style, a bunch of cool backgrounds and the type of special moves you rarely see in this style of puzzle game. Even if you’re just playing against the computer, Tetris Battle Gaiden is an absolute blast.

Unfortunately, the game selection is also this compilation’s most glaring problem. This is a collection where the most famous versions of the game are nowhere to be found in the collection. A great example of this are the iterations published by Nintendo on both the Game Boy and Nintendo Entertainment System. The documentary footage spends a bulk of its time detailing everything that went into securing the rights to these games, yet you can’t play them. The same is true for Sega’s arcade version and the infamous Tengen cartridge that was briefly released in 1989. Both of those games came up repeatedly in the documentary footage, but are nowhere in the selection of games. That’s disappointing.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there. While it’s nice that we get several versions of the spin-off Hatris, other so-called Tetris sequels are only represented in the footage. Where’s Welltris? Where’s Wordtris? Where’s Faces ... Tris III? Where’s Muddle, the casino game Alexey programmed after Tetris? Some of these games get lengthy videos that go into their history and importance, so it’s surprising that they aren’t part of the package. Granted, Alexey isn’t a big fan of some of these weird off-shoots, but if they are going to spend that much time showing us the games, then it would have been nice to include them.

The frustrating part about this is that a lot of the games that are included barely get a mention in the documentary footage. Oh sure, they’ll show us the history of how Bombliss came to be, but they yadda-yadda-yadda their way through the various sequels and incarnations. You can read about how Super Bombliss is different from Super Bombliss DX, but it feels like a massive afterthought in the Tetris story. A lot more could be said about how the Tetris and Bombliss series evolved throughout the 1990s.

If you’re looking for a comprehensive list of all (or, at least, most) of the Tetris incarnations released in the last fourty years, then you may be disappointed by Tetris Forever. From Tetrisphere to The Next Tetris to 3D Tetris, there are a lot of versions of Tetris that are not included. Some of them are mentioned in the documentary, while others are glossed over completely. Obviously, some versions of Tetris are unavailable due to licensing issues (such as Disney’s Magical Tetris Challenge), while others are too new to be included in this kind of package (like Tetris Effect). That said, we do get a pretty great making-of video that goes into Tetris Effect and what the future holds for Tetris in general.

While it’s disappointing that we didn’t get more types of Tetris games, the 18 titles in the package cover a lot of ground and show how the series evolved over the years. Yes, it’s a little frustrating that my preferred version of Tetris isn’t playable in this compilation, but that’s not a big deal, because I found the Classic Mode in the Super Tetris sequels to be just as good (if not better). And if you’re really itching to play the classic Game Boy pack-in from 1989, many people’s introduction to the puzzler, then you’re in luck, because there’s a recreation of that monochromatic Tetris in the brand-new Tetris Time Warp game. The fact that we’re this far into the review and only now touching on Tetris Time Warp, a new single- and multiplayer game that jumps between the different eras of Tetris, is a testament to how much content there is in this package.

While some may be disappointed that there aren’t more Tetris games, it’s the story and archival footage and material that really brings this compilation together. This is the kind of history lesson that the Gold Master Series was made for, and I had so much fun looking at the pictures, scans, advertisements and videos from that pivotal time in our history. It gave me a greater appreciation for Tetris and the enduring friendship between Henk and Alexey. In the end, Tetris Forever is the feel-good game of the year.