We all know Tetris. Or, at least, we think we do. But while the core concept of the game hasn’t changed over the years, the implementation of that concept has a surprisingly rich history, starting with the game’s original release in the West—for MS-DOS, in January 1988—and continuing right through to the bewildering assortment of versions available today. This history is explored in minute detail during the newest video from YouTuber Garrett “Acerola” Gunnell, who usually makes (excellent) content about graphics programming. This video is something different for his channel, and it’s both minutely detailed and impressively comprehensive.
Watching this video is a strange experience in a personal sense because the version I played most was the original DOS version from the 1980s. I’ve devoted a few idle minutes to various versions in the decade since, but they all seems basically the same—which made sense, because the original was pretty much perfect on arrival. Wasn’t it?
Nope, says Gunnell. And he’s right, too. Once he points out the flaws of the 1980s version, they seem glaring and inexplicable: you can’t rotate the block until it’s fallen a couple of rows, because the game won’t allow it to “collide” with the top of the screen. If you choose to drop the block currently in play, it’ll plummet straight to the bottom of the playfield (referred to as a “hard drop”. ) The UI kinda sucks. And so on.
So how has Tetris changed in the nearly four decades since? It’s that question that Gunnell sets out to answer over the course of the 40-odd minutes of his video—recreating various key versions in Godot as he goes—and the answer is surprisingly nuanced. While you might assume that every new version seems to come with some new gimmick or other, that’s not really the case. There have certainly been attempts to add entirely new gameplay modes or features—take Tetris Battle Gaiden, for example, which is a multiplayer game featuring various characters that can cast their own individual set of spells to affect the gameplay, or Tetris II, with its various levels and challenges. (Inevitably, there’s even something called Sextris, but it’s honestly so lame that it doesn’t even really qualify as being NSFW.)
That’s not to say that there haven’t been key innovations over the years; it’s just that they’re more subtle improvements than radical overhauls. The game’s evolution has come mostly via a process of slow iteration on the minutiae of the game’s deceptively simple mechanics: the extension of the playfield off the top of the screen to allow blocks to rotate immediately; the advent of the “wall kick”; the replacement of the hard drop with a more progressive, forgiving alternative.
It turns out that these minutiae are the real Tetris rabbit hole. Did you know that there are multiple rotation systems used by various versions, and that these fall into rough lineages based on which company’s implementation the version is based on? Or that the simple question of how the next piece is chosen—randomly, from a pool, or some more complex approach—has caused all manner of angst? Neither did I, and it’s fascinating to learn how much thought has gone into these questions over the years.
The only thing missing from the video is the game’s sequel. I don’t mean Tetris 2, a game almost indistinguishable from Tetris, or any of the other games that billed themselves as a sequel in some sense or other; I mean Tetris creator Alexei Pajinitov’s actual follow-up project, the almost-forgotten pseudo-3D game Welltris, which placed four Tetris fields on the four sides of a rectangular well, and was just as fiendishly addictive as its predecessor. I’ve never understood why it didn’t catch on like Tetris did—but if there’s a story there, it’ll have to wait for this video’s sequel.
English (US) ·