Along with Shmups few games transcend gaming it self, even fewer has as storied a history as tetris and besides the horrible Xblade NONE come from mother russia. Tetris is one of those games that just trancends all gaming. Those pro gamers? put them in front of a REAL game like Tetris and their feeble brains won't put together enough lines to get past level 9, It takes skill and a sharp fast thinking mind to do well in Tetris not a quick mouse and BFG. Yet from the youngest child to my 83 year old great aunt anyone can really step up and give Tetris ago.

To date due to alot of legal wrangling and question marks there are thousands of versions of Tetris. They all are for the most part The same game, there are also games like the American version of Panel de Pon which exploit the Tetris name (like Panel De Pon which it self is a fantastic game and another personal favorite) I'm going to get to my 5 favorite versions of Tetris in a bit (though the list may be 10 becuase there are so many good versions)


How though, How did tetris get to where it is? Why until the fall of the great soviet empire did it's creator not see a dime of royalties from Tetris? Well if you don't know the story here it is.

His full name Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov, and in 1984 he created a game for which would be up there with other pure greats like Pac man and Space Invaders but unlike the creators of those classics he was Russian not Japanese. The game was in the sprit of Pentominos a fun little greek puzzle. (Of which at least 1 "Kiddy" tetris would use) It can't be said that the Tetromino was created by tetris. but it is the most common use of them. The game was programmed on a soviet computer called the Elektronika 60 and later ported to the IBM PC by 2 friends of Pajitnov, Dmitry Pavlovsky, and Vadim Gerasimov The IBM version made it outside of mother russia and the bid to get this game released world wide began.

Due to a few rights confusions the soviet government was the licensor for Tetris while Pajitnov had a seperate company this is what led to the many legal issues around tetris. Through this confusion Atari got the arcade rights, Nintendo go the home rights and any console historian knows what happens with that.

It wasn't until 1996 that Tetris' creator finally got the rights to his own game back. He has however created a few games that aren't tetris. Weltris being one of the best, The fun but not so great Hatris and if you have an XBOX 360 then Hexic is another one of his you've played, He also did wild snake and the Puzzles in the SNES version of Yoshi's Cookie.

Ok, Now we know the rules stack the blocks to form lines and erase them by taking out 1-4 at once. 4 being a tetris. There's alot of technical and math involved in the generation and such for tetris for which I suggest reading the Tetris wiki.

OK now it's time to move on to my 5 favorite versions of Tetris

Tetris Battle Gaiden Super Famicom, 1993



The foundations for some of what we'd see in another fantastic puzzle game Super Puzzle fighter II X are first seen here, special attacks and 1 vs 1 play (though Puyo Puyo and arcade tetris already had this) It also had some pretty memorable characters and awesome music. A good Japanese take on the Russian classic.


Magical Tetris Challenge Nintendo 64 1998


Capcom put this one out, this one is one of the few that is a tetris game but delves into pentominoes after some play pentominos start to fall. Now don't let the Disney backdrop fool you, this is still a fantastic entry into Tetris and after only 10 minutes of play I was hooked and plan to go back to it when I'm done writing this.

Tetris the Grandmaster Challenge 2 Arcade 2000


Akira best known for arcade fighters like Street fighter EX and EX2 as well as the little known spin off game Fighting layer did what some consider the definitive Tetris One poster at Assmbler stated

"One beast of a game: Challenging to beginners as well as to professionals, visually basic but beautiful to look at and motivating as hell."

After spending 15 minutes with this version, he's right. it is an amazing envisioning of Tetris, one no mame install should be without.

Tetis- Atari arcade 1989



My personal favorite. The arcade version later ported illegally by Tengen to the NES and ligation ensued, resulting in one of the most expensive versions of the greatest game ever made. This is however much better than Nintendo's version, the Music is more memorable the pieces are more uniform so there's more guess work involved in where to place things for the best result. The speed is another factor in which this game is WIN it's much faster than Nintendo Tetris.

AND the WINNER is............

Tetis -MS DOS ??? ???



Funny story, we used to run this on a Tandy with no hard drive just 2 floppy drives and HUGE ONES at that.
This is one of the few non shareware games we had and this was the Tetis I learned to play with. Later we got what was at the time a state of the art Windows 3.1 machine and that system just ran this mofo WAY too fast.

As far as a pure Tetris experence goes short of having an Electronika 60 this is it. No music, no anything just you, some nice backdrops and the tetris pieces. If you ask me this as pure as Tetris gets.


YES I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW I left the Gameboy versions out but SO WHAT Tetris isn't NINTENDO's game.
I loved the game boy version but it's not the best. My opinion is the 5 I highlighted are the definitive versions of Tetris.