The fascinating thing about Tetris is its absolute simplicity. There are no maps, no levels, no missions. There are only these seven different blocks falling down in random sequence with increasing speed. Basically each game of Tetris is the same as the one you played last time, yet it is different enough to have you play for hours and hours.
There is no story, no simulation, the game is completely abstract. The blocks do not pretend to be anything they aren't. They are just blocks, geometrical figures, they exist only for the sake of the game.
You could call it a puzzle game, you could call it an arcade game (though, I think, nobody ever did), it does not belong into any category, it is a category of its own. And while some like arcade games and some dislike them, some like puzzle games and some dislike them, nobody seems to dislike Tetris.
At least nobody I ever met.
It could be played on anything. It has been played on anything. The Electronica 60 on which it was conceived had monochrome phosphor terminals that displayed only basic characters, the squares were drawn as pairs of brackets, like this: [].
For input, you do not even need a keyboard. Four buttons are all that is needed. A digital joystick would do. You do not even need a monitor. Any array of 10×20 LEDs, or light bulbs, would do. An office building has been used as a display for Tetris. You might want something else to display the score, but Tetris would be fun and addictive even without a score system.
Yet, while Tetris has been played on anything and everything imaginable, it has always first and foremost been a PC game. Tetris first put the IBM PC on the map, game-wise. At that time, the PC was anything but a gaming platform. While there had been PC games since the very beginning, they were usually ports or clones from other platforms, mainframes, home micros, video consoles, or arcade coin-ops. And for seven years, Tetris defined what PC gaming was all about.
To the uninitiated, playing games on a PC comes as something of a surprise. After all, aren't PCs the dull grey blocks seen sitting on a million office desks throughout the country? Those in the know, however, have found that PC gaming is an altogether different experience from alien-bashing on a Commodore Amiga, or platform bouncing on a Nintendo. A PC game is more likely to exercise your game than your joystick trigger finger.
This paragraph was written in 1992 by Christina Erskine, editor of the PC Review, in the introduction of the PC Games Bible. The next year, Doom redefined what PC gaming was all about, and maybe she would not have said this any more.
Unlike later spin-offs like Welltris, none of the commercial releases of the original Tetris were made in Russia, let alone by the original developers. There are three commercial versions of Tetris, each with its own design: by Spectrum Holobyte (US), Mirrorsoft (UK), and Bullet Proof Software (Japan).
The Spectrum Holobyte version is the most widely known. Spectrum Holobytes themselves distributed in the US and Canada, and Infogrames in Europe (continental Europe only?), in a different box. The box and title screen featured a detailed large graphic of Saint Basil's Cathedral against a red background. The title was printed in yellow in correct cyrillic spelling, the last letter replaced with a hammer and sickle. The gameplay screen had only minimal status messages and background images, one for each level, showing various Russian scenes. The Infogrames box showed falling blocks with some stylized dancers and musicians in the left and right margins.
Mirrorsoft mainly published some 8-bit ports, made by Andromeda Software.
The Amiga and Atari ST versions were possibly distributed in the UK only, in
any case they are usually considered inferior to the Spectrum Holobyte
versions. The box and title screen featured
a somewhat stylized Saint Basil's Cathedral, seen from a great distance in
an otherwise empty space with a gradient sky in the background. This picture,
in pale colors, was inside a frame, the title was outside, in red on a black
background, in Latin letters, but with an inverted R (pretty silly, since
this letter stands for yah
in the Russian alphabet). The gameplay
screen had lots of status messages taking up most of the space outside the
well and thus no background images.
Technically these ports followed Spectrum Holobyte, but the graphics were different and more ambitious. They used a sort of stencil font for the status messages and the logo. On the box the name was printed in yellow on red background, with just a small, very stylized graphic of (once again) Saint Basil's Cathedral at the bottom. On the title screen, the logo had a red-yellow gradient against a photographic background with the sky edited to a dark blue. The gameplay screens had a similar background (the first level, the only one I've ever seen, showed Novgorod), and on the more powerful platforms, the pieces had gradients too.
The 8-bit platforms and the PC-98 didn't cope all too well with this ambitious concept. The Famicom version is different, better adjusted to the platform.
Nintendo of America had its own version for the NES. Sega had their own license too, for an arcade machine and their consoles. Tetris for the Commodore 64 was puiblished by Spectrum Holobyte in the US and Mirrorsoft in Europe, but it is nevertheless a completely different game.
This is the first videogame to be ported to a system intended for text adventures. Andrew Plotkin performed this feat as a joke, firmly establishing his reputation in the interactive fiction community as a complete and utter madman. Since then, the practice of abusing the Z-machine in this way has spread, and it's difficult now to fully appreciate the amazement and horror that the idea originally inspired.
