Nintendo has added a new title for Switch Online, that may seem mundane, but is actually monumental, particularly because it’s happening this year.
They made this announcement on Twitter:
“A puzzle classic returns!
Tetris® for NES comes to Nintendo Switch Online on 12/12!”
As reported by GoNintendo, Nintendo of Japan has also announced a Tetris 99 Maximus Cup to meet the occasion. As this usually goes, Nintendo will announce the same Maximus Cup for the rest of the world in the coming days.
We won’t review the entire history of Tetris here, but the version that came to the NES in 1989 has an interesting history for itself.
When Tetris first got released in different platforms around the world, the game’s intellectual property rights were under a dark legal cloud. Game developer BPS released one such version for the Famicom in 1988.
BPS’ owner, Henk Rogers, successfully convinced Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi that they needed to license the game as a can’t-miss international hit. Rogers then went to the Soviet Union and won the rights for the game on Nintendo’s behalf.
Nintendo first published Tetris as the pack-in title for the Game Boy in 1988. However, in 1989, Tengen, AKA Atari Games, made a Tetris game for the NES that was not authorized by Nintendo.
Atari Games already made an arcade version of Tetris, and naturally, they wanted to bring the game to what was the most successful home console of the time. At the same time, they were also feuding with Nintendo of America.
And so Atari came up with a technical workaround to publish games that would run on the NES, without working with Nintendo. They had published a few other games already, but Tetris being the cash cow that it was, was the last straw.
Nintendo successfully sued Atari Games, as the official licensee for the Tetris IP, and they were able to get all copies of this game pulled from shelves. Ironically, this version of the game is now best known as a popular ROM to be included in many Famiclones, and later, just spread on its own online.
Nintendo’s version of Tetris for the NES came to North America in 1989, and then came to Europe in 1990. Developed by Nintendo R&D1, it is ironically known for its many programming peculiarities, though Nintendo’s own developers have not talked much about its development.
While many gamers will tell you that the Atari Games version of Tetris is actually better, the R&D1 version of Tetris has become more important today. This is the version of the game that speedrunners and the competitive community have latched onto as one of, if not the most, popular versions to play.
We reported on preteen Tetris record holder Blue Scuti meeting Henk Rogers and the game’s original creator, Alexei Pajitnov, at the start of this year. Tetris players were chasing the record Blue Scuti reached for the last 40 years, because R&D1’s Tetris was so strange that the community kept changing the rules on how to ‘beat’ it.
So, this Switch Online release is more than just another nostalgia run for older Nintendo fans. We may be reporting on Blue Scuti and other competitive Tetris players breaking Tetris records on Switch Online in the coming years.
But for most of us, we can just enjoy playing Tetris, the old fashioned way, in the strange way that R&D1 made it. You can download Tetris on the NES app as an update this coming December 12.
