Tetris Forever evaluate – 40 years of the Soviet Union’s best sport

With its 40th anniversary due to start next year, it can be difficult for younger gamers to appreciate its impact and relevance (or perhaps not). But apart from anything it was the game that sold the Game Boy, and without the Game Boy’s handheld dominance Nintendo may have ended up on a very different trajectory than it is today.

But even that is just a single part of one of the most interesting behind the scenes stories in all gaming. One that involves Cold War era intrigue and Robert Maxwell trying, and failing, to convince Mikhail Gorbachev, and his other Kremlin contacts, to gift him the rights to the game. All of which was portrayed in the surprisingly entertaining, if highly sensationalised, Tetris movie on Apple TV+.

The movie downplays Nintendo’s role in things but was inspired by David Sheff’s 1993 book Game Over, which we always recommend to those interested in the early days of the games industry. If you don’t want to read that though (or are only interested in the Tetris bit) then you now have another alternative to the movie, in the form of this ‘interactive museum’.

It’s by remaster experts Digital Eclipse and follows the same format as their excellent Atari 50 compilation, as well as other more focused titles like The Making Of Karateka and Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story.

So, while you can play all 18 included versions of Tetris from a simple menu, the best way to experience things is by working through the timeline to explore the life and times of the franchise, from its inception to the modern day, through the medium of videos, photos, short text explanations, and playable games.

30 years ago, this would’ve been referred to as multimedia, a concept that never really took off with the limited technology of the time but here the history of Tetris is told via whatever media is most appropriate to get the point across, from retro TV ads to Japanese posters and talking head interviews.

The magic of Tetris’ backstory is that it’s all a lot more interesting than you would’ve thought, even if most people know the basics, of it being the invention of Soviet programmer Alexey Pajitnov, who simply wanted to bring a little fun and happiness to the world. In the early days Tetris always revelled in its Soviet origins and, in its own small way, was a celebration of the thawing of the Cold War.

You’ll notice that we haven’t yet attempted to explain what Tetris is or how it’s played, but with over 200 million copies sold (and that’s probably a gross underestimation when you add in mobile versions, let alone unofficial clones) we feel that would be an insult to the game’s legacy.

There is a problem with Tetris Forever though, as despite what you might imagine this does not include all the different versions of the game or anything close to it. There’re no cross-licensed versions at all, so while you do get the very first version of the game, created on the Soviet computer format Electronika 60, there’s nothing here at all by Nintendo, EA, or any of the many other companies that have brought Tetris to over 65 different formats in the last 39 years.

There are some interestingly weird sequels and spin-offs, but many of those had nothing to do with Pajitnov, even though he did work on a number of them back in the day. Pseudo-sequel BomBliss, and all its variants, are all but forgotten today, while Tetris Battle Gaiden was never released outside of Japan. They’re interesting novelties but there are obvious gaps in the collection, with no Welltris or Faces – which Pajitnov did actually work on – and instead only a couple of versions of Hatris.

The most serious problem is that this means Tetris Forever does not include the two best versions of the game: the original Game Boy edition and the more recent Tetris Effect by Tetsuya Mizuguchi. Nintendo would never allow someone else to licence their games to appear on other formats, so this is no surprise, but it does leave a gaping hole in the collection.

Developer Digital Eclipse has tried to work round this though, via Tetris Time Warp: an entirely new game made specifically for this occasion. It plays as a perfectly bog standard, modern version of the game, until you clear a line with a special glowing tetromino and it transforms into one of the many Tetris variants from throughout the years, including a legally distinct version of the original Game Boy game.

Time Warp is as good a compromise as you could hope for, given all the legal issues, but while Tetris Forever is a very interesting interactive museum, for sheer entertainment value you’d probably be better off watching the movie (or better still reading the book) and buying a copy of Tetris Effect instead.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £29.24
Publisher: Digital Eclipse
Developer: Digital Eclipse
Release Date: 12th November 2024
Age Rating: 3