Tetris Forever - an impression

Having written a bit on here about Tetris Forever, Digital Eclipse's "Gold Master Series" instalment covering Tetris, I feel it is only fair that I give some impressions of the game now that it's out. (Can we call something like this a game? Sure.)

In terms of documentary, it's very much the "official corporate history" version of the story. Most of the talking is done by Alexey Pajitnov and Henk Rogers, and a lot of it covers their partnership, the eventual founding of the Tetris company, etc. Which in terms of stuff like Pajitnov's original development is pretty interesting, since he's the original creator and all. But when we come to the various western and Japanese ports of the game and various spinoffs, the focus inherently goes to e.g. Bullet-Point Software's versions, since Henk Rogers is the one doing most of the talking.

There's some coverage to Spectrum Holobyte's versions too, with former CEO Gilman Louie being interviewed, but for example the CD-i version is essentially just represented as a text slide saying "it existed and had pretty graphics and music". The Sega arcade version gets some coverage courtesy of Tetsuya Mizuguchi discussing its influence on him, as well as interestingly a set of scans of the packaging and documentation of the legendary unreleased Megadrive version, but I have to wonder if this is just down to Mizuguchi happened to discuss it while they were interviewing him about Tetris Effect. Atari's arcade version is barely mentioned at all, and Tengen's version is mostly covered in the context of the legal battles with Nintendo, without much mention of what it was like as a game. Arika's TGM series is similarly only mentioned very briefly, despite being a pretty important and influential version.

An interesting inclusion is the various versions of Bombliss. As it's published by BPS it makes sense that it's included, but the material around it is mostly from the publishing perspective, with Henk Rogers essentially discussing it as a knockoff that he generously decided to pay the creator to publish. And like, there's more going on here since there's some interesting developer cred behind this game, but none of that is really discussed, which I think is a shame.

Obviously it's the Nintendo versions that most people are going to wonder about. And these versions aren't playable - which I guess is to be expected since Nintendo isn't really the "licensing things out" sort. There is some discussion of them though, mostly around the famous trips to Russia Henk Rogers made to try and get the rights. Honestly, these bits are pretty interesting, and are aided by the inclusion of the home movie footage that Rogers took on these trips, which is an interesting thing to see.

A lot of the playable versions are various BPS-developed instalments, and they're all fine and competently emulated to my eye (although some seem to be intended to have some sort of battery backup score saving, which I am not sure is implemented in the emulation). At this point I assume Digital Eclipse has reasonable off-the-shelf emulator support for most of the standard consoles due to their previous projects, so getting a bunch of Famicom / Super Famicom / Game Boy games working is not an arduous task.

As originally announced, the home computer versions of Tetris were represented really just by the Apple II version from Spectrum Holobyte, but as it's come out there's also some MS-DOS representation: the original Vadim Gerasimov PC version as well as Spectrum Holobyte's version. This emulation is apparently based on Aaron Giles's DREAMM emulator, and it's cool to see this used in a commercial product. A decent effort has been made to make these versions, originally designed with keyboard in mind, also work fine with a game controller. What does feel like an omission, given there's fairly good coverage of them, is Spectrum Holobyte's later versions, such as Welltris, Tetris Classic, etc. I think in theory the licensing for these is not an issue since Digital Eclipse's parent company happens to own Spectrum Holobyte's assets (hence why their versions are here to begin with) but given that the DOS emulation seems to have been something of a last-minute addition there may have not been enough time to get them running.

With the Apple II version, its inclusion feels odd in that it IS included. Like why this over other home computer versions? I'm guessing it was originally prepared when they didn't know if they were able to include the DOS version, and they kept it in - but it feels like a weird hangover.

An inclusion that I think makes sense but is also kinda out of place in terms of this being a Tetris compilation is BPS's Go game that got Henk Rogers his in with Nintendo. It's definitely part of the story being told so it's interesting to see it, though.

The original Electronika 60 version is represented through a recreated version, since apparently emulating this system was not really feasible and like it's difficult for me to confirm but it looks the part at least. The other non-emulated version is the new one, Tetris Time Warp, which is based around the gimmick of at certain points you'll be thrown into a retro version of Tetris and have to complete a challenge for bonus points. From what I've seen these are "get 4 lines in Electronika 60 Tetris, get a double in Game Boy Tetris, and set off a big bomb in Bombliss". It's a neat enough gimmick.

Tetris Time Warp also includes a few other modes - there's a multiplayer that I haven't tried but there's also "Modern Marathon" which is a 150-line marathon mode of modern guidelines Tetris, and there's "1989 Marathon" which is basically a recreation of Game Boy Tetris, in a 150-line marathon mode. And honestly it is nice to have it represented in this form - I'm not sure how accurate a recreation it is but it looks and sounds the part, and feels like it's playing like the Game Boy version although I'd have to directly compare to see if it differs. It kind of feels like its inclusion complements the "Classic Tetris" mode in Tetris Effect which recreates the NES version.

It is good that, compared to previous Digital Eclipse projects that are sometimes limited by nervous publishers, we don't have to shy away from mentioning Nintendo. The included emulated games still have the "Licensed by Nintendo" messages intact, and the images of the box art haven't had to be scrubbed of Nintendo trade dress. And there's no awkward working around mentioning the names of consoles. I'm guessing with the Gold Master Series being essentially self-published these anxieties are less of an issue than they are when working for Capcom or Disney or whoever.

Overall, I think Tetris Forever was inevitably going to be the "official" version. With the focus on the Henk Rogers side of the story, and not much mention of controversies like some of the legal actions taken against people making free clones and such, we are left with a museum that shows this nice friendly game dev business guy who gets on great with Alexey Pajitnov. Although the interview with Maya Rogers talking about running the Tetris company and making Tetris like a lifestyle brand does feel like it gives things away a bit, like corpo types do not realise that when they say things it comes across weird to normal people. It occurs to me that like, not much attention is given to the developers of the individual variants, like there's the discussion of the overall design choices but this is kind of the high-level managerial view of game development. Compared to like the other Gold Masters Series instalments which mostly discuss the work of solo devs (and the Karateka one does also discuss like the specifics of who did different ports and what they contributed and such) this feels a bit not great.

I think if you want a Tetris documentary, this is one perspective, but you'll want to seek out others. I'm particularly a fan of this Gaming Historian video about the rights battle. I'd also encourage you to look up stuff about the Classic Tetris World Championships, which are given a bit of coverage here but I think not nearly enough coverage. As a games compilation, it's a perfectly cromulent BPS-published Tetris Variants compilation, but I reckon it could have also been a perfectly cromulent Spectrum Holobyte PC Tetris Variants compilation with a bit more work.

If you just want to play a Tetris, honestly get Tetris Effect. If you're interested in history though this is a neat thing to pick up but don't take it as the sole authority on what's important.