E3 09: On the future of Tetris as a virtual sport

3:00 PM on 06.03.2009   |   Ben Perlee

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In an interview I had yesterday with Tetris creator, Alexey Pajitnov, and CEO of The Tetris Company, Henk Rogers, a veritable plethora of interesting information came out. Sure, the typical can be expected, but what was most interesting is the potential future of the game. Rogers and Pajitnov actually have some pretty impressive ideas, most interestingly Tetris’ future as the first virtual sport. That’s right, a virtual sport.

Of course, anybody who has played Tetris at a high enough level will know that Tetris isn’t exactly the most exciting. Every player just plays the same, you know. However, this duo has plans. Can you imagine a team based Tetris mode? How about 6v6 matches? We might just see it, according to Rogers:

There is one player who is “it”, obviously, and the other players, the other team, are all attacking that one guy. If it looks like he’s going to top out, he passes off to another player. Either choose left or choose right, and he can recover, but he can pass it to somebody who has cleared his play field to the point where he is about to pound somebody on the other side. He can send a bunch of Tetrises in a row. Then you get into all of the planning, You can have offensive players, you can send the “ball” so to speak, to the offensive player, or you can send it to the defensive player who is really good at surviving, and he get’s attacked and survives. So we are working out all of the interesting aspects of taking Tetris and giving players different characteristics.