20
TETRIS (1985): CASUAL GAMING FALLS INTO PLACE
Alexey Pajitnov's Tetris, created and introduced to the United States in the mid-1980s, is perhaps the greatest videogame ever to come out of Russia—or arguably anywhere else in the world, for that matter. It has been endlessly cloned and ported for almost every viable platform, and is still widely played today on all manner of devices, including mobile phones. Tetris is also a useful illustration of two important principles of good game design. The first is that it's easy to learn, yet hard to master. Second, despite its simple appearance, it's a game that could be possible (practically speaking, at least) only in electronic format. It's one of those games that we wish we had thought of ourselves; it seems so obvious, yet it took a computer engineer to invent.
Tetris later led to the rise of what is now called “casual gaming.” This genre of videogames covers a broad array of gameplay styles, but is usually confined to low-tech games that can be run in a browser or low-budget hardware. They are also casual in the sense that they can be picked up, played for a few minutes, and put down without losing anything important—in stark contrast to most popular games for computers and consoles, which require a significant time investment to learn and play. In this chapter, we'll discuss the history of Tetris, its impact on the market, and the future of the genre that it helped create.
Tetris is usually described as a “sliding block” or, more generally, a “puzzle” game. The game consists of moving and rotating seven different pieces (called “tetrominoes”) as they fall toward the bottom of the screen. The goal is to make the individual squares that make up the tetrominoes form a horizontal line; when this happens, the line is erased, lowering any incomplete lines above it. The player is also awarded points; most versions offer bonus points if the player is able to simultaneously clear more than one line at once (the maximum is four, which is called the titular “Tetris”). Making clean lines is critical, because bungled efforts quickly result in stacks of unmatched pieces. The game ends if a new piece is blocked by such a stack and is unable to fall past the top of the playfield. In most versions, the pieces fall very slowly at first, gradually speeding up as the game progresses.
The IBM PC version of Tetris credits A. Pajitnov and V. Gerasimov. Despite the game's overwhelming popularity, Pajitnov himself wouldn't earn a dime from the game until a decade later, when he at last acquired the rights to his own program.
Why do so many people have so much fun playing such a simple game? Besides the competitive factor (most versions offer a high score table) and the increasing speed (which quickly ratchets up the intensity), the game seems to satisfy some basic desire to impose order on chaos; to “tidy up.” We might compare this aspect of the game to blasting the aliens, one by one, in Space Invaders (Chapter 16, “Space Invaders (1978): The Japanese Descend”), which we likened to the joys of popping each bubble on a sheet of bubble wrap. It's tempting to bandy about terms like “obsessive-compulsive” to describe such behavior. Perhaps we could also talk about Freud's “anal stage,” with the disappearing lines of tetrominoes analogous to our solid waste being flushed away in the toilet. Given this model, we might describe Tetris- fans as “anal-retentive,” compulsively arranging those pieces in some futile quest to achieve the gratification they missed during toilet training. Pajitnov himself had designed some psychology-related games before Tetris, so it's possible he had such things in mind as he created his masterpiece. In any case, there's no denying the satisfaction one gets from seeing a stack of badly arranged tetrominoes organized and whisked away.
Many of the countless original Tetris ports, like the one shown here on the Philips CD-i from 1992, added superfluous window dressing around the core gameplay model. In the CD-i version's case, it was the addition of full-motion video backgrounds. For most fans, all that mattered to them about a port or clone was whether the core gameplay remained intact, not the quality of the graphics or sound.
Pajitnov programmed the game on an Elektronika 60, a Soviet clone of the DEC PDP-11 mainframe. According to his friend and fellow game programmer Vadim Gerasimov, Pajitnov got the name by combining “tetramino” and “tennis,” his favorite sport. Although Pajitnov's exposure to videogames was quite limited, he did get a chance to see Pac-Man (Chapter 13, “Pac-Man (1980): Japanese Gumption, American Consumption”) and cube-hopping arcade classic, Q*bert (Gottlieb, 1982).1 Pajitnov created the game purely for fun as a type of electronic variation of the pentomino puzzles he liked to solve,2 but soon realized he had a hit on his hands when he noticed the game showing up on pretty much every Elektronika 60 in the country.
Pajitnov ported it to the IBM PC, upgrading the graphics along the way. This version spread just as quickly, and it wasn't long before foreign companies wanted to secure exclusive rights to distribute what was sure to be a multimillion dollar mega hit. Here's where the story gets quite murky and contested. In short, the Soviet Union didn't allow individuals like Pajitnov to own programs and make contracts with foreign companies concerning those programs. Instead, the government (and its agencies) were responsible for such matters.
Pajitnov seems quite touchy about the subject: “I don't really like to talk about that because when I think about those things I lose my sense of humour,” he said in an interview posted on the website Kikizo. To make a long story short, Pajitnov lost control of the project, and several different foreign companies held (or thought they held) rights or even exclusive rights to the game. One of the first commercial releases was Spectrum Holobyte's version for the IBM PC, which debuted in 1986. Spectrum Holobyte had secured the rights from a British software company named Andromeda, who didn't really have any official authorization to do so (they had gotten the game from some Hungarians who had somehow managed to get a copy from the Soviet Union). Eventually Andromeda did secure official rights to license the game for the IBM PC and other home computers.
Atari's arcade conversion of Tetris, shown here, which was later ported to the NES before being pulled over rights, featured a head-to-head mode.
The licensing arrangements got even more complicated (and dubious) after 1988, when the Soviet government set up the “Elektronorgtechnica,” which was made responsible for marketing and licensing the game. However, by this point six different companies were claiming rights to Tetris for all manner of platforms. The government ended up giving Atari the rights to the arcade version and Nintendo rights to versions for consoles (except, strangely enough, in Japan) and handhelds.
Atari jumped the gun, however, and, under its Tengen banner, released a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) version without permission. This version was considered to be superior to Nintendo's, because it allowed two players to play the game simultaneously on juxtaposed boards. Nintendo, however, took them to court and managed to get Tengen's game taken off the shelves.
Meanwhile, Nintendo was able to leverage its license to great success for its Game Boy handheld, released in 1989. The game sold millions of copies, and countless gamers bought a Game Boy specifically to play Tetris, which for a time came bundled with the system.
Nintendo's Tetris for their NES, shown here, was considered inferior to Tengen's conversion, which allowed for simultaneous two-player competitions.
In 1996, the rights reverted to Pajitnov, who had emigrated to the United States and teamed up with Henk Rogers. Rogers formed The Tetris Company with the goal of extracting some royalties from the many companies making Tetris games. However, although the company claims the exclusive right to the Tetris name, their control over Tetris-like games is not certain. The upshot is that people making unauthorized Tetris clones have called them by other names, such as Wolfgang Strobl's Klotz (1989; PC), to avoid litigation, and The Tetris Company hasn't been aggressive in shutting down these operations. Although Pajitnov may not have received any royalties when he made the game, he seems satisfied with the money he has received in conjunction with this new company.
Pajitnov created several other games based on Tetris, such as Welltris (1989). The game gets it name from its 3D setup; the pieces fall into the center of the screen as though into a hole (or a well). Although perhaps more cognitively advanced than Tetris, this game hasn't received nearly the same publicity. Pajitnov went on to make several other mind and puzzle games. Among his latest is Hexic, a colorful puzzle game inspired by Bejeweled (which we'll discuss in a moment).
Dr. Mario for the NES was one of many “themed” Tetris-style games, and one of the many examples of Nintendo's practice of repackaging its characters from one type of game for use in another. Dr. Mario also offered the popular side-by-side competitive play mode that was absent from Nintendo's original attempt at Tetris for the platform.
Although no derivative of Tetris has achieved the recognition or success of the original, there have been several noteworthy attempts. One of the best known is Dr. Mario, a 1990 game for the NES with branding from Nintendo's popular Mario franchise. Here, the Tetris-style gameplay is given a medical theme. Instead of blocks, players guide pills (consisting of two blocks) that fall from the top of the screen to a set of viruses toward the bottom. Players win the game by matching up pills and viruses of the corresponding color (red, blue, or yellow). There was also a popular two-player mode available, which employed side-by-side simultaneous gameplay.
An even more radical derivative is Capcom's Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, released in 1996. The game pits players against each other in the same side-by-side setup we saw in Dr. Mario and Atari's version of Tetris. The players are represented by parodied versions of characters from Capcom's Street Fighter series (Chapter 17, “Street Fighter II (1991): Would You Like the Combo?”), who fight each other as the players match up gems. Like Dr. Mario, the falling bits consist of two blocks, and must be connected to other gems of the identical color. However, lining them up isn't enough; only a special exploding block of like color will clear the formations. Whenever this happens, the fighters will respond with one of the moves (or combos) that they used in Capcom's popular fighting games.
The main Tetris series has had a series of interesting offshoots, including Word Tris (box back for the Super Nintendo version shown), in which the object is to build words of three letters or more using tiles that fall from the top of the playing area. Nintendo's platforms have always been home to popular puzzle games, including the unrelated—though extremely popular—Tetris Attack, which requires matching colored blocks.
It's likely that the staggering success of Tetris made publishers more responsive to similar puzzle games from other developers. Of these, perhaps the four most famous are Sega's Columns (1990), Compile's Puyo Puyo (also known as Puyo Pop, 1991), Taito's Puzzle Bobble (also known as Bust-a-Move, 1994), and PopCap Games's Bejeweled (2001).
Screenshot from the arcade version of Sega's Columns.
Columns takes place inside a tall, rectangular playing field, similar to Tetris. Columns of three different colored jewels appear, one at a time, at the top of the screen and fall to the bottom, landing either on the floor or on top of previously fallen columns. After a column has fallen, if there are three or more of the same symbols connected in a straight line horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, those symbols disappear. The pile of columns then settles under gravity. Occasionally, a special column called the Magic Jewel appears, which flashes with different colors and destroys all the jewels with the same color as the one underneath it when it lands.
Screenshot from the arcade version of Compile's Puyo Puyo, which is probably better known to U.S. gamers in some of its home incarnations, like Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine for the Sega Genesis and Kirby's Avalanche for the Super Nintendo.
Puyo Puyo’s basic goal is for one of the players to defeat their opponent (computer or human) in a battle by filling their tall, rectangular playing field up to the top with garbage blocks. The gelatinous and expressive Puyos fall from the top of the screen in groups of two or more, and can be moved left and right and rotated. When four or more Puyos of the same color form together to create a group—whether vertical, horizontal, or in a Tetris-shaped piece—they form a chain, then pop and disappear. Because doing well in one playfield would send the garbage blocks to the opponent's, it was always an exciting race to execute a chain reaction big enough to completely bury the other player's Puyos.
Screenshot from Taito's arcade version of Puzzle Bobble for SNK's Neo Geo platform.
Puzzle Bobble, based on the characters from single-screen arcade platformer, Bubble Bobble (1986), contains a rectangular playfield with a prearranged pattern of colored bubbles. At the bottom of the screen, the player controls a rotating pointer that can aim and fire a queued colored bubble at the top bubbles, preferably forming and clearing matching chains of three. The objective is to clear all the bubbles from the playfield before they eventually creep down to the bottom.
Bejeweled is one of the first major “casual games.” It was created with Macromedia Flash, a Web programming language often used to make animated ads for websites. The game was so successful that it was eventually published as a best-selling multiplatform stand-alone game, but has continued to be a mainstay of online casual gaming sites. Bejeweled, like Puzzle Bobble, has its pieces already fill the board when the game begins. The goal is to swap adjacent gems around to make a chain of three gems of the same color. New gems fall only when players clear room for them on the board.
Bejeweled is one of the most successful “casual games” ever made. Casual games are intended for so-called noncore (hardcore) gamers, who often have limited technical knowledge and little interest in investing their time in learning complicated games. Games like Bejeweled are known for being easy to learn, yet hard to master.
Highly addictive and well-crafted games like Bejeweled are no doubt responsible for the rise in “casual gaming” over the last few years. Although many of these games are available exclusively online, some also appear on store shelves alongside titles with bigger budgets. They are also popular choices for gaming on mobile phones. In general, though, these games seem to have the most appeal for “nontraditional” gamers with little interest in the latest Halo or Madden (Chapters 5 and 10, respectively). They are, as is often stated, quite popular among women and older gamers. For instance, all of author Barton's grandparents are avid casual gamers, spending hours and hours every evening engrossed in casual games like PopCap's aforementioned Bejeweled and Bookworm (2004). Bookworm, also known as Bespelled, is a fun variation on Bejeweled; instead of matching gems, players make words out of letter tiles. Interestingly, though ostensibly role-playing games, the Puzzle Quest series, starting with the 1997 release of Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords on the Nintendo DS and Sony PlayStation Portable, even uses a competitive Bejeweled-style playfield to resolve in-game combat and other activities as part of its hybrid gameplay.
As Pajitnov's original character-based version of Tetris proved, any platform with a display makes a suitable playing environment. Box back shown from a version of Joseph Zbiciak's 4-Tris (2000) for the Mattel Intellivision, just one of a seemingly never-ending series of modern homebrew games based on Tetris for classic platforms.
When Emma Boyes of GameSpot UK asked Pajitnov whether people would play Tetris forever, he responded, “Yes. Technology may change but our brains don't. So basically, I don't know why not.”3 To many, this is what makes Tetris the “perfect” videogame—one that's at home on any platform in any setting. Tetris has never been about dazzling graphics or sophisticated gameplay; it's a simple diversion that somehow manages to stay fresh and compelling year after year. It's also a testament to the fact that great, best-selling games don't always require multimillion-dollar budgets and huge teams of professional game developers. As Tetris proves, what one really needs to make a great game is the imagination to conceive it.
1See Kikizo's interview with Pajitnov for the source of these and other facts about Tetris at http://games.kikizo.com/features/tetris_iv_dec07_p2.asp.
2A standard pentomino puzzle involves tiling a rectangular box with the differently shaped pentominoes by covering it without overlap or gaps.