Tetris Forever Tells the Convoluted History of Tetris—Again

If you’re a stranger to Paste’s games section, or the personal tastes of its editor (um, hi), you might not know that Digital Eclipse’s Gold Master Series is probably our favorite thing in games right now. Unlike most compilations of retro games, the Gold Master Series isn’t just a menu of games to play with a paragraph or two of info about their creation. It’s a unique combination of documentary and games comp, digging deep into the history of games and placing them within the context of the industry and the medium at the time they were created. The Gold Master Series supplements the games themselves with newly filmed interviews and copious amounts of material from the game’s era—behind-the-scenes photos, design documents, vintage ads and other promotional material, and more. And it’s all arranged on easy-to-follow timelines; if you follow them in sequence you’ll learn a lot about how a game was made before getting to play it yourself.

For example, that means fastidiously detailing the development of Jordan Mechner’s groundbreaking 1984 computer game Karateka, using playable versions of prototypes and earlier games designed by Mechner to help show how different Karateka was from what came before. It means turning Atari 50 into an hours-long examination of the earliest days of arcade and home videogames, from Pong’s success in the early ‘70s, up to the crash of 1983, and then through the long, slow decline of Atari with 2600 and 7200 games from the late ‘80s. It means delving into the life and work of iconoclastic designer Jeff Minter. Every Gold Master Series release (and Atari 50, which isn’t officially part of the series, but introduced the format) has revealed new details about important gaming history, whether it’s fairly obscure (the painstaking lengths Mechner went to to achieve his cinematic goals) or one of the most well-known stories in gaming (the rise and fall of Atari). 

The latest installment comes out on Nov. 12, and tries something new for the Gold Master Series: it focuses on one of the two or three biggest targets something like this could ever aim for. Tetris Forever digs into the origins of the 40-year-old smash puzzle game, a game that, unlike 2600 hits or Minter’s psychedelic arcade trips or Mechner’s playable kung fu movie, will remain popular and relevant with all generations for as long as anybody plays videogames. And it speaks to the greatest strength of Digital Eclipse’s Gold Master Series that the entry for the most famous and popular game it’s done yet—perhaps the most famous and popular videogame ever, really—is the least essential one so far. 

We’re not saying you need an obscure topic to make a great Gold Master Series release, but almost no games are less obscure than Tetris. And familiarity with a game isn’t a problem at all; in fact, using one of the biggest games ever to show off their format is how Digital Eclipse can make this series so popular and undeniable that even the biggest developers and publishers will want to work with them in the future. The hangup here is that the story of Tetris is incredibly well-known at this point. If you’re the kind of person who’d go out of their way to learn about videogame history, odds are you already know about how Russian computer engineer Alexey Pajitnov came up with Tetris and the culture clash between East and West that turned the game’s worldwide expansion into a tangled legal mess. For the first time a Gold Master Series game feels like it’s following in the footsteps of others instead of doing something new and vital. 

This story has been told in detail several times before. Dan Ackerman’s book The Tetris Effect, Box Brown’s graphic novel Tetris: The Games People Play, and Apple’s movie Tetris (in which Henk Rogers, the Dutch-American game designer and businessman who helped export the game from the Soviet Union and who today runs The Tetris Company with Pajitnov, is played by Taron Egerton of The Gentleman and Rocketman fame) have all explored this history, and although it’s good to see Pajitnov and Rogers tell it in their own words, there aren’t many major or notable details that haven’t already been discussed elsewhere.

If you haven’t read the books, seen the movie, or ever looked into the origins of Tetris, you’ll probably be fascinated (and a little baffled) by the misunderstanding that resulted in multiple companies thinking they had the rights to release Tetris in the ‘80s. There are over 90 minutes of video footage here, including lengthy interview sessions with both Pajitnov and Rogers. Digital Eclipse always does a fantastic job researching and presenting these packages, and Tetris Forever is no different.

The familiarity of the story isn’t the only thing that prevents Tetris Forever from reaching the heights of the Karateka, Minter, and Atari projects, though. Many of the games mentioned in the documentary footage aren’t a part of this package—including the most famous versions of Tetris (at least in America). If you were hoping to play the Game Boy version of Tetris—the one that elevated Tetris from a hit PC game to a true pop culture phenomenon that has remained relevant for decades—you’ll have to get a Nintendo Switch and subscribe to its online service to play it. If you want to play the NES version of Tetris, you can’t play it here or on the Switch. You’ll see footage of both in the documentary—lots of footage of the Game Boy version, of course—but won’t be able to play it. The documentary also discusses other games Pajitnov designed in the wake of Tetris; three different versions of Hatris are included here, but Welltris, a 3D take on the main game where blocks fall down the sides of the screen onto a playfield at the center, isn’t included, despite video interviews about how Pajitnov had to figure out how to make the game’s new perspective both coherent and entertaining for players. Previous Gold Master Series entries have mentioned games that weren’t playable before, but it’s never been this prominent. Other than the earliest versions of Tetris, every game here is one that was originally published by Rogers’ company Bullet-Proof Software, which makes it pretty clear that publishers of other games mentioned in the documentary weren’t interested in participating. Nobody can fault The Tetris Company or Digital Eclipse for not wanting to pay however much Nintendo wanted to make their versions of Tetris available; if Nintendo was even willing to play ball, the licensing fee for the Game Boy version alone probably would’ve made the entire project unfeasible. But it’s a little weird and disappointing to not be able to play what is, for most players, the most iconic version of the game that this whole release focuses on.

Also missing are the Tengen versions of Tetris for the NES and arcades, and the Sega arcade version that was a major hit in Japan. The Tengen releases aren’t nearly as significant to the rise of Tetris as the Nintendo ones, but they’re a crucial part of the copyright issues at the heart of this story. Again, for practical business and legal concerns, it makes sense why they aren’t playable, but since all three are mentioned multiple times in the documentary, anybody who picks this up and watches all the video clips would understandably expect to be able to play them. This is one of the drawbacks of releasing a comprehensive history of a game or developer that’s also playable; inevitably some of the games or versions most important to the history won’t be available due to copyright issues. 

That said, there are some great lesser known versions and spinoffs of Tetris available here, a few of which are being released outside of Japan for the first time. Tetris Battle Gaiden, a 1993 Super Famicom (SNES) game making its American debut, is a head-to-head Tetris fight featuring a menagerie of colorful characters with their own game-altering special skills. It’s a version of Tetris that’s essentially in conversation with Puyo Puyo, over two decades before the two puzzle games officially faced off in 2014’s Puyo Puyo Tetris. And there are a handful of different versions of Bombliss on here (or, as it’s known in the States, Tetris Blast), a game I’ve long been aware of but never played until now. Its destructive approach to clearing lines—some tetrominoes have bombs embedded in them, and if they’re in a cleared line they’ll explode, chaining together with any bombs in other lines that happen to be touching them—fundamentally changes the goal of Tetris. It works even better as the basis of individual puzzle levels, where you try to clear preset arrangements of lines with a small number of specific tetrominoes. This mode turns the ultimate puzzle game into a true puzzle, a discrete challenge with one specific solution to discover. Pajitnov didn’t create Bombliss (one of its creators, Tsunekazu Ishihara, was a Tetris fan who was later key to the creation of Pokémon and has been president of The Pokémon Company since it was founded) so it’s a little surprising to see it here in various forms while his own Tetris follow-up, Welltris, is nowhere to be found, but I’m not complaining: Bombliss is a blast in all of its permutations.

Speaking of Pajitnov, although he is the guy who made Tetris, the documentary is dominated by Rogers, a charismatic extrovert and Tetris zealot who probably did more to popularize the game than anybody else. He wasn’t responsible for the first Western release of Tetris, but he was the one who actually had the legal rights to release the game worldwide after traveling to the Soviet Union in the ‘80s to negotiate the rights himself. By the time it gets to the early ‘90s, after the legal issues behind Tetris’s ownership and licensing were settled, Tetris Forever’s documentary basically becomes a checklist with Rogers (getting occasional help from Pajitnov and Henk’s daughter Maya, who is the current CEO of The Tetris Company) running down the different versions of Tetris they’ve cranked out since 1995. Rogers is a game designer himself (he made The Black Onyx, which is considered to be the game that popularized RPGs in Japan) but he’s devoted his career to Pajitnov’s game. It makes sense that Rogers would speak more than Pajitnov in the interviews, as his English is flawless and he’s been involved with Tetris almost from the beginning, but it’s still a little odd to see the actual creator of Tetris take a backseat in a documentary about his game. Rogers is a natural storyteller and incredibly easy to listen to, but Tetris Forever could use a little more Alexey.

Taking a page from Atari 50, which includes a handful of new games alongside Atari classics from the ‘70s and ‘80s, Tetris Forever includes one brand new version of the game. Made by Digital Eclipse, Tetris Timewarp starts off like the current standard game of Tetris. It features a new kind of block, though, which, when cleared, will briefly toss you into a different era of Tetris, complete with whatever rule set was in place at that time. So you’ll be playing a Tetris where you can dead drop blocks, slide them after they land, or even spin them into a difficult position (assuming you time it perfectly, of course), and then suddenly jump to the original 1985 Tetris that has an entirely different scoring system and no special tricks. You can really rack up the points during these time warps, which only last for a set amount of time; if you complete a specific goal before time runs out, though, you’ll jump to another era. So you might find yourself playing modern Tetris, the NES version of Bombliss, and then a recreation of Game Boy Tetris within a single 30 second block. You’ll need to immediately recognize the era when you time warp and know the specific rules of that version, which means you’ll do your best at Timewarp if you’ve already played all the other games in Tetris Forever (and a few that aren’t included). The ingenious thing is that Timewarp is also a history lesson in and of itself, revealing how Tetris has changed over the decades. Given the ubiquity of Tetris itself—if you’re interested in the game you can definitely find a version you can play somewhere, even if you don’t own a console or play computer games—this new era-spanning riff on the game might be the best reason to pick up Tetris Forever.

Don’t let these criticisms or that number at the top of this page dissuade you. They come from a place of experience with and deep love for Digital Eclipse’s work; this particular installment might not be our favorite, but it’s still excellent. If this is your first Gold Master Series, you’ll be really impressed at the reliably great work Digital Eclipse does here. If you’ve somehow never played Tetris, or at least not enough to fall in love with a specific version, and have never heard the story of how it was created and introduced to the world, you might hang on Rogers’ and Pajitnov’s every word. If you’ve read Ackerman’s or Brown’s books, or seen the movie, you’re just going to hear the same history but in the words of the men who lived it. And if you were hoping to play the same exact game you became obsessed with on the Game Boy or NES at the dawn of the ‘90s, you’ll have to look elsewhere. 

Tetris Forever was created and published by Digital Eclipse. Our review is based on the PlayStation 5 version. It’s also available for PC, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and the Atari VCS.

Tetris was developed by Alexey Pajitnov.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, comedy, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.