Collection essentials #107: Tetris (NES, unlicensed)

You knew I would get to this eventually, one of the most famous video games of all-time, Tetris!! There’s quite a history behind this iconic and beloved game. As you may know, it was created in Russia during the Cold War, and I’m not going to tell the whole story, but bringing the game to the rest of the world proved to be a complicated issue that resulted in legal snares and battles, enough that an entire movie was released last year on the topic. 

This particular release for the NES by itself has quite a tumultuous story surrounding it. Atari Games (owner of the Tengen brand) had received the rights to produce an arcade version of Tetris. Then, they wanted to port this version into cartridge form for Nintendo’s home console. Atari Games and Nintendo already had an antagonistic relationship. Nintendo, thanks to having a near-monopoly over the video game console market at the time, made steep demands of people who made games for them, and most developers didn’t have much choice because there was a chip Nintendo would put in their cartridges required for games to run, and someone looking to create games without Nintendo’s consent would have to find a way to produce the chip somehow without Nintendo’s cooperation. So there’s a story bigger than just Tetris about Atari Games and Nintendo’s butting heads in court. Atari Games actually wound up getting crucial info from the US Copyright Office under false pretenses, so they were temporarily able to release unlicensed games like this without Nintendo’s consent, though eventually their false pretenses were exposed and they lost that legal battle. In Tetris’s case, there was the major problem that they hadn’t actually properly secured the rights to publish a console version of Tetris in the USA even though they thought they had, so this version of Tetris here was only produced for a few weeks before Atari Games lost that legal battle and had to take the game off shelves. So this cartridge is actually fairly rare because of it. Atari may seem like the bad guy there, but the truth is Nintendo’s monopolistic business practices weren’t so nice and certainly not good for the industry. That was only a rather basic retelling of all that legal stuff, so if that sounds interesting to you, go look into it some more! 

Okay, now, about the game itself. I feel like Tetris is about the closest one can get to a “perfect” video game. It’s so very simple, yet challenging, engaging, and playable for just about anybody regardless of how much experience they have with video games. You are given a series of blocks that consist of four squares arranged in different patterns, and your goal is to make them fit along the playing field. A line will clear when you have blocks across an entire line. You’ll get more points if you eliminate multiple rows in one move. If your blocks reach the top of the screen, it’s game over. The issue with Tetris, though, is that if you’re talking about it in terms of where it should rank among the great games in video game history, you have the problem of singling out which version is best! There are SO many of them!!! 

This particular version of Tetris is very good. You have the basic “endless” way to play like every Tetris game has in which you aim for a high score. You can play with two players, which is cool, although it’s not the best two-player Tetris experience because the two players won’t interact with each other at all. And in fact, if one player loses, the other just keeps on playing indefinitely. There is ANOTHER multiplayer mode in this version that’s really interesting, though, where two players both control pieces that they drop into one play area that’s bigger than normal (pictured). It’s pretty cool, and you don’t see something like that in very many versions of Tetris!

After Atari Games was forced to cease production of Tetris, Nintendo officially obtained the rights to publish console Tetris games, and would do so later that year. Stay tuned tomorrow to read about that version!