Is there an aspiring game developer out there who hasn't made their own Tetris clone? A web search for Tetris will bring up hundreds or thousands of various free and shareware knock-offs of the game for download or in-browser play.

As a Nintendo fan-boy who was introduced to Tetris when the GameBoy was first released, I always associated Tetris with Nintendo; an association that was re-enforced when subsequent versions of the game were released for the NES and along with Dr. Mario for the SNES. So as a Nintendo fan-man who wanted to get into game development, and started by trying to recreate my favorite games like Super Mario and Legend of Zelda, I gravitated to Tetris as one of the game models I wanted to re-create.

I created several of my own knock-offs of the game with different themes: Christmas, Las Vegas, psychedelic 60's etc. But most of my versions ended up being themed skins with little of the game mechanics changing other than the way you accumulated your score. They served me well as learning experiences, but there was really no point to playing them afterwards. There was nothing that set it above or apart from the original versions of Tetris, or the hundreds of other versions on the web.

In the dozen-plus knock-offs of Tetris I have made, there are two concepts that I think have a little merit. They definitely aren't better versions of Tetris, but at least they are different enough to set themselves apart from the hundreds of other Tetris clones on the web.



Quake n' Break started out as QuakeBlox when I thought I was being clever (because no one on the Internet ever over-used the letter X, especially in the early 00s). The unique feature of Quake n' Break is that when you clear a line, the screen starts to shake for several seconds and it becomes more difficult to place your pieces (they move a little faster during the shake).


Tetrodance is Tetris controlled by moving in front of a web cam instead of using conventional control methods. Unless you really exaggerate, you don't really dance, but you do wave your arm left and right to move, and lift them up to either turn your piece or drop it down. Because physical activity is involved, I altered the scoring a little to reward longer play sessions.

Both of these games are available for free at http://JackGames.com

How about you? Have you ever seen or thought of a gimmick that you think would give a new spin on something overdone like Tetris?