If you always thought Tetris would be better as a brutal war of attrition, pitting you against dozens of other players to see who can emerge from the block-strewn battlefield as the sole victor, well, Nintendo has good news for you. Yesterday they released Tetris 99 for free for the Switch. Designed by Arika, and exclusively on the Switch, Tetris 99 turns the classic puzzler’s competitive multiplayer mode into a full-fledged battle royale game, with up to 99 different online players competing directly against each other.
It plays just like the Tetris you know and remember (unless you’re my middle-school-aged nephews, who had absolutely no idea how to play Tetris when they were at my house on Thanksgiving). Blocks fall from the sky, you can turn them and move them right and left as they fall, and the goal is to use those blocks to form unbroken lines at the bottom of the screen. If you complete two or more lines at a time, you’ll send junk rows over to one of your 98 opponents, cluttering up their field and driving them closer to the end. You can target specific opponents with your junk rows, or anybody who’s close to going bust, or even just random people. (Really, Tetris 99 doesn’t care whose day you ruin.) And at the end there can be only one survivor. It’s like Fortnite or PUBG in puzzle form, wrapped around what’s probably the most famous videogame in the world.
You can watch a trailer for Tetris 99 below, and if you subscribe to the Nintendo Switch Online service, you can go download and play it for free right now.