For me, the most interesting thing about the Spectrum version of a well-known game is always how the designers deal with the rather peculiar graphics of this platform. In the case of Tetris, though they sometimes chose the easy way out, they did rather well. Let's take a look at the title screen first:
St. Basil's Cathedral was sort of a Tetris trademark. It had to be there—or had it? Only the Commodore 64 version, and later the second arcade machine by Sega, dared omit it. Here, as in all Mirrosrsoft versions, it is small, just a silhouette, on the ZX certainly a good idea. Unfortunately, the artists completely botched the color gradient for the sky, unless the palette of my screenshot is grotesquely false Simply replacing the gray with white would have improved it a lot.
As for the game itself, the designers skipped the usual scenes of life in Russia and went for a mechanical surrounding vaguely reminiscent of Arkanoid (which came out in the same year on this platform and became smash hit). All in all, a job well done.
