Put a piece made of four squares at the top of a well ten squares wide, let it fall, and let the player slide and turn it on the way down. Fill a row and it vanishes; let the pile reach the top and the game is over. That is the whole of the rule set, and it was written down in Moscow in the mid-1980s. Within five years it had been sold in a red box in Britain and America, packed into the box with Nintendo’s Game Boy, and copied so often that by 1994 Edge could talk about “a million Tetris clones already out there”. Every falling-block game since has been reviewed against Tetris.
Fast facts
- The original: Tetris, by Alexey Pajitnov at the Computer Centre of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, 1984 by most later accounts; Nintendo Power wrote in 1989 that he adapted it for the IBM PC in late 1985.
- In the West: January 1988, from Mirrorsoft in Britain and Spectrum HoloByte in America.
- The pack-in: Nintendo put Tetris in the box with the Game Boy everywhere except Japan: in American shops by the autumn of 1989, in Britain from September 1990.
- Variations named in the period press: Welltris (Pajitnov; on the Amiga by 1990), Columns (Sega, 1990), Dr. Mario (Nintendo, 1990), Puyo Puyo (Compile, 1991).
The rules, as first described
CRASH explained the game to Spectrum owners in March 1988:
blocks of differe[n]t shapes drop from the top of the screen into a box. Each block is made up of four small squares arranged to make a larger square, an L shape or a column. As the blocks fall they can be rotated or moved horizontally so that every space in the box is filled. Ten small squares make up one ho[r]izontal line in the box. When a line is completely without empty spaces, it scrolls down so that the process can be repeated.
The review picked out the features later games kept. A box “shows what shape of block will appear onscreen next. Thus strategic decisions can be taken on how to place the blocks leaving no gaps.” There were ten skill levels, and “the higher the level, the [f]aster the blocks fall”. A piece “can be speeded up anytime, so if you’ve decided where to place a block you don’t have to wait for it!” And the speed rose with success, so that “You can never ‘win’ Tetris”. Computer Gaming World said the same of the MS-DOS version two months later (“you can send it to the bottom of the frame for higher points”) and gave the verdict that stuck: “deceptively simple and insidiously addictive.” It counted “six possible shapes”; there are seven, every way of joining four squares edge to edge if a shape and its mirror image count as different pieces.
For a programmer the appeal is how little there is to build. The well is a grid of cells, each empty or full. A piece is four cells and a position. Before every move or turn the program asks one question, whether any of the four cells would land on a full cell or outside the well, and refuses the move if so. When a piece can fall no further it is copied into the grid, every row is checked for a gap, and full rows are removed and the rows above dropped down. Everything else (the preview, the speed-up, the score) sits on top of that loop.
Where it came from
CRASH presented Tetris as “the first Russian-designed computer game to be commercially available in the West”, crediting “Vagin Gerasimov and Alexi Paszitnov” [sic]. Both CRASH and Computer Gaming World described Vadim Gerasimov, who wrote the PC version, as an 18-year-old Moscow student; Gerasimov’s own account makes him 16 when he worked on it. Edge’s 1996 sketch of Pajitnov has him at “the Computer Centre of the Moscow Academy of Science”, interested in pentominoes, the puzzle of fitting shapes made from five squares into a rectangle, and writing a computer version that “became massively popular throughout the Academy and, soon, in offices all over Moscow”. Then “Word spread to the West and it sparked the most desperate and protracted scramble for the rights to any game ever produced. Nintendo, perhaps inevitably, won the day.” The story of those rights is told in the Tetris legal battles.
The Game Boy
Nintendo Power announced in its July/August 1989 issue that every Game Boy would come with a Game Pak: “Better hold on to something! It’s Tetris!!!” Its description of the game runs to three sentences: “Turn, flip, and maneuver falling geometric shapes into solid patterns. Create a complete line and it will disappear earning you big points. Cinch, right? Uh-huh. Yeah. Sure.” It added that an NES version was on its way “later this year”. The pairing made both. By 1994 Edge was writing that Tetris had become “one of the most played games of all time (mostly due to Nintendo and its Game Boy)”, and in 1996 it called it “the most popular Game boy title of all time”.
Variations
The reviews of the games that followed show how many ways there were to change one part of the rule set:
- Change the well. Pajitnov’s own sequel, Welltris, had the player “looking down into a four-sided well with grid-like walls and bottom”, with pieces that could be “moved from wall to wall”. Amazing Computing reported Spectrum HoloByte’s Amiga release in August 1990, at $34.95, as “the second program from Soviet game designer Alexey Pajitov” [sic].
- Match colours instead of filling rows. Columns (Sega, Mega Drive, 1990) drops “assorted blocks of three, the order of which can be changed as they fall down. When a minimum of three jewels of the same colour are placed together, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, they disappear - and the jewels above fall down to fill the gaps.” Mean Machines filed it as “a game of the ‘classic simplicity’ type, such as Tetris and Klax.” The rule that pieces above a cleared group fall into the gap opened the way to chain reactions, where one clear sets off another.
- Give the well a goal. Dr. Mario (Nintendo, 1990) is “a super puzzle game like Tetris” in which Mario is “out to wipe out a pesky virus colony”. Instead of surviving as long as possible, the player clears a fixed set of viruses, and two players can start “with a different number of viruses” to even the odds.
- Attack the other player. Puyo Puyo (Compile, 1991; Mega Drive, December 1992) has the player “control falling pairs of coloured blobs” and link groups of a colour; in a two-player game “a counter-shower of clear blobs rains down on the other player, thwarting any blob-dropping plans they might have had.” Edge judged it closer to Columns than to Tetris, and noted that Sega had renamed it Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine for the West.
By 1994 Edge was weighing a new falling-block game against “a million Tetris clones already out there”, many of them in “the shareware or public domain category that the Amiga and PC enjoy”.
After the 1990s
The form kept its rules by agreement. In 1999 Henk Rogers told Edge how the companies with claims on Tetris had pooled them in The Tetris Company, and how his Blue Planet Software wrote a document, “What is Tetris?”, fixing how pieces fall and turn so that every licensed version plays the same game. The Game Boy version alone had passed “over 30 million” by then. New versions kept changing the setting rather than the rules: Nintendo’s Tetris 99 (2019) put 99 players in one match, and Puyo Puyo’s chain-and-attack design is still made by Sega, which bought the series from Compile. For the game’s 40th anniversary in 2024, The Tetris Company claimed more than 520 million units sold across all versions.
Sources
- CRASH issue 50, March 1988, p. 10: Tetris review (Mirrorsoft, £7.99 cassette, £12.99 disk; the credits; the Which? Computer Show launch; the rules, the next-piece box, the ten levels; Gerasimov as an 18-year-old Moscow University student; 77%).
- Computer Gaming World issue 47, May 1988: Roy Wagner, “Two Titles from Spectrum HoloByte’s International Series” (Tetris and Soko-Ban; the 30-year-old researcher and 18-year-old student; “six possible shapes”; the verdict).
- Nintendo Power issue 7, July/August 1989, p. 84: Tetris in the Game Boy box; the NES version. Issue 8, September/October 1989: Pajitnov adapted the game for the IBM PC “in late 1985”.
- Edge issue 244, September 2012: Pajitnov’s notable games, “Tetris (1984)”. Retro Gamer issue 119, October 2013: “in 1984, came Tetris”.
- Amazing Computing vol. 5 no. 8, August 1990: Welltris news item (Spectrum HoloByte, $34.95).
- Mean Machines issue 2, November 1990: Columns review.
- Nintendo Power issue 14, July 1990: Dr. Mario preview.
- Edge issue 7, April 1994: Super Puyo Puyo testscreen (the Mega Drive release in December 1992, Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, “a million Tetris clones”, “one of the most played games of all time”).
- Edge issue 30, March 1996: “Power Players”, Alexey Pajitnov (the Computer Centre, pentominoes, the scramble for the rights, “the most popular Game boy title of all time”).
- Edge issue 74, August 1999: Henk Rogers interview (The Tetris Company, “What is Tetris?”, “over 30 million” Game Boy sales).
- Vadim Gerasimov, “Tetris Story” (web, secondary): his age and the PC version. https://vadim.oversigma.com/Tetris.htm
- Game Informer, 13 February 2019, “Tetris 99 Is A Battle Royale Puzzler” (web, secondary). https://www.gameinformer.com/nintendo-direct/2019/02/13/tetris-99-is-a-battle-royale-puzzler-nintendo-switch-online-exclusive
- The Tetris Company, World Tetris Day press release, 2024 (web, secondary): “over 520 million units”. https://tetris.com/news/world-tetris-day-press-release-2024