Nintendo decided to do something special to commemorate today’s special occasion.
At the dawn of this year’s The Game Awards, it also happens to be the 40 year anniversary of Tetris, the falling block well puzzle game that took over the world.
To commemorate the occasion, no less than Tetris creator Alexei Pajitnov came on video to announce that Nintendo’s version of Tetris for NES, as well as Tetris DX for Game Boy Color, are being added to Nintendo Switch Online.
We already told the story of Nintendo’s Tetris. Rushed to the market by R&D1, it’s full of strange programming anomalies. While for many years older gamers would hype up the unlicensed version of the game on NES made by Tengen, Nintendo’s version organically became more famous and popular today. That’s because its eccentric qualities made it a popular title for the speedrunning and competitive Tetris community.
We’ll spend a few paragraphs here talking about Tetris DX. This version of the game came after 20 or so other Tetris variants released on various consoles, including Hatris, which was really a match 3 game with hats, Welltris, which conceptually seems to be a Tetris and Tempest hybrid, and Faces…tris.
Tetris DX wasn’t particularly ambitious, but it is arguably an important title when outlining the history of the official Tetris ruleset. It has an early version of the super rotation system, before its rules were formalized.
Without getting too deep into it, you can rotate the blocks in such a way that they can go up instead of falling down. Advanced players could exploit this, but the rest of us mainly saw an improved version of Tetris for Game Boy from 9 years earlier. These improvements came in the form of color graphics, extra modes, and better AI to choose blocks for a more enduring challenge.
Around the time Tetris DX was released, Pajitnov had successfully emigrated to the US. With the help of his old friend Henk Rogers of BPS (Blue Planet Software, FKA Bullet-Proof Software) he founded The Tetris Company, and so this was one of the first games where he personally earned royalties for sales of the game.
So, you may personally not have nostalgia for Tetris DX, but it was certainly an important game in Pajitnov’s life. Of course, Pajitnov’s appearance in Nintendo’s video makes it clear that BPS and The Tetris Company licensed these games with Nintendo. We certainly hope that it also means that other non-Tetris games that Nintendo and Pajitnov worked on, such as Yoshi’s Cookie and Knight Move, could also make their way to Switch Online in the future as well.
Oh, and we’d also love to see Hexic, WildSnake, Pandora’s Box, and Dwice get rereleased too, but maybe this is out of Nintendo’s hands. In any case, you can watch Pajitnov’s lovely announcement video below.
