Play Tetris Forever, my friends.
The video game industry is shockingly bad at preserving its history.
Outside of a small number of near-mythologised figures like Sid Meier and Shigeru Miyamoto, it’s also long been terrible at telling the stories of the people who built its foundations.
The team at Digital Eclipse has been doing tremendous work to change all of this over the last few years with its Gold Master Series. On offer are museum-like packages that allow the player to watch original interview footage, play games, and explore collected paraphernalia on a particular studio, game series, or individual creator.
Tetris Forever is the latest such Gold Master, and also my first time directly experiencing an entry in the series. It convinced me not just that I need to buy all of them, but that I need to shout from the rooftops for everyone else to do so too.
Tetris Forever is structured into 5 lengthy chapters. Their contents are all fully unlocked from the start, but the magic of the package comes from how wonderfully engaging it is as an experience, moving from start to finish like a gallery exhibit.
If you’ve seen the surprisingly great Tetris movie on Apple+ over the past year then you’ll know the foundations of the tale; the Dutch-born, America-raised, Japan-based game designer and entrepreneur Henk Rogers plays a weird block-dropping computer game made by Soviet-Russian programmer Alexey Pajitnov and becomes obsessed with bringing it to the world. The true version features less car chases with the KGB than the movie, but that doesn’t mean that it’s any less enthralling.
The first two chapters cover the 1980’s, the third and fourth cover the 90’s, and the fifth covers everything else up to the present day. Each presents a timeline from which original documentary footage can be viewed, high-definition scans of advertisements, personal photographs, and documents can be examined, and incredible 3D-scans of game boxes can be looked at and spun around. Rather importantly, full versions of many of the games featured within all of those things can be played.
The documentary footage is predominantly comprised of original interviews conducted by Digital Eclipse with Rogers and Pajitnov, but also sports major contributions from Roger’s daughter Maya who currently heads The Tetris Company that the two men founded, Tetris Effect designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi, game designer and business figure Gilman Louie, guys from Broderbund… The number of key people featured and the depth of insight they give is really impressive. While most of the clips are only a couple minutes long, there’s hours and hours worth of them, and all are interspersed with an absolutely incredible amount of footage shot by Rogers himself at the time that all of it was happening.
While Rogers and Pajitnov are each delightful storytellers on their own, the scenes where the two are interviewed together are utterly joyous. The love and admiration both men have carried for one another across four decades is just so tangible. There’s a sincere warmth to every interaction between them, and they’re frequently hilarious too.
The work that’s gone into presenting the history of Rogers, Pajitnov, and The Tetris Company is staggeringly impressive and truly of archival quality, but here’s the thing, Tetris Forever really is just presenting that particular history. The Tetris Company evolved from Rogers’ original Japan-based games publishing company Bullet Proof Software. While Tetris Forever showcases an impressive amount of flawlessly emulated games and immaculately preserved material from Bullet Proof’s vault, it’s basically devoid of anything that they didn’t have direct control or ownership over.
While one could never realistically expect something as recent as Tetris Effect to be made fully playable as part of a collection like this, the fact that Mizuguchi himself and footage of the game are featured throughout the documentary material still cannot help but make its omission feel a bit weird. On the other hand, not mentioning it at all would be giving a less complete version of history.
It’s a problem that arises frequently as you work through the timeline; a unique version of Tetris is talked about and you immediately want to play it, only to find that it isn’t there. I’m sure that in many cases the source code either wasn’t available or the licensing issues were just insurmountable. I couldn’t help but find it frustrating though, and increasingly so as I moved closer to the present day and found that even less of the Tetris releases which I still consciously remember are actually playable within the collection.
The major offender though is that there’s no playable version of the most iconic Tetris of all, the original Game Boy version. Given how protective Nintendo is of its properties, its omission is not really surprising when you think about it. It is the version most people will immediately think of when they think Tetris though, so one can’t help but feel like there’s a pretty massive hole in Tetris Forever both as a product and as a museum piece without it.
Tetris Forever does feature one entirely new and original Tetris game called Tetris Time Warp. It broadly plays like your standard Tetris except that Time Warp Tetriminos will occasionally spawn. Complete a line with one and you’ll be warped to a random older version of Tetris from those playable in the Tetris Forever collection. While there you’ll have 20 seconds to score as many lines as possible for a points bonus before being warped back.
It’s a super fun spin on the classic formula that in its rhythms feels quite akin to the zone mechanic from Tetris Effect. More than that though, it’s a brilliantly clever and thematically perfect capstone to the Tetris Forever experience.
Tetris Forever is the most joyful and wondrous experience I’ve had with a video game all year and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone and everyone. Its only crime is that it does such an intensely good job of getting you keen to consume every weird version of Tetris that’s out there that it can’t help but bring a twang of disappointment at its inability to deliver most of them as playable builds within itself. The folks at Digital Eclipse are doing remarkable and important work with these collections and I hope we continue to see many more of them.
Tetris Forever is available from 12 November on Windows PC, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, PS4, PS5, and Switch.
Tetris Forever was reviewed using a promotional code on PC provided by the publisher. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.
This article may contain affiliate links, meaning we could earn a small commission if you click-through and make a purchase. Stevivor is an independent outlet and our journalism is in no way influenced by any advertiser or commercial initiative.
