It looks like falling block grandmasters have something to celebrate.
As reported by Gematsu, Arika has announced a new deal with The Tetris Company to make a new official Tetris game. Arika says that this new game will be based on the concept of a “Tetris that makes you better at Tetris.” While we have no further details, they will be releasing this game before the end of this fiscal year. That means we can expect to see it before March 31, 2025.
Now, Arika isn’t quite an obscurity, but they certainly are not a household name like the likes of Capcom or Konami. The company’s initial claim to fame was making the Street Fighter EX games, and the latest title in that series, Fighting EX Layer. They also have a low profile relationship with Nintendo, making games with the company’s IP like Endless Ocean, Super Mario Bros. 35, Tetris 99, and Dr. Mario Rx.
However, Arika would be very well known by the Tetris community, for a franchise that has nothing to do with Street Fighter or Nintendo. Tetris: The Grand Master, originally released in arcades in 1998, changed the way Tetris was played on the competitive scene, and also changed Tetris as a whole.
Arika’s Tetris: The Grand Master series utilized completely different rulesets than those found in the ‘official’ Tetris games produced or licensed by Bullet Proof Software, later known as Blue Planet Software, and by The Tetris Company. A big highlight of these games are how much harder they are. While it’s easy to see that these versions of Tetris get fast very quickly, competitive players have to contend with complex, and even obtuse, rule conditions, that would get even more complicated with each game.
In 2009, Arika announced Tetris: The Grand Master 4 – The Masters of Round, only to cancel it the following year. In 2015, they started location testing of the game in Japan and the US, now using the tentative name The Grand Master 2015.
At the time, the title change made it clear that Arika lost the Tetris license. While that was disappointing, it could have opened up the franchise to new possibilities. While The Tetris Company holds the globally recognized copyright to Tetris, they can’t enforce any IP rights to the general gameplay idea of Tetris. For this reason, many falling block games like Tetris have appeared over the years. Most notoriously, Sanuk Games released Tetraminos in 2015, which looks like Tetris to the naked eye, but distinguishes itself with its differing ruleset.
Arika looked like they wanted to do something like what Sanuk Games did in 2015. However, in recent years we saw the Arcade Archives rereleases of Tetris: The Grand Master and Tetris The Absolute: The Grand Master 2 for PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch. This indicated that Arika and The Tetris Company entered some sort of licensing agreement after all, and it just took us this long to see it come to fruition.
While some gamers see The Tetris Effect as the culmination of the franchise, there were always gamers who wanted something else. Tetris Forever is going to be satisfy those older fans who want to reminisce on the franchise’s history. Arika now seems set to deliver the experience that competitive players want to receive.
