mental_floss magazine
SUBSCRIBE >
GIFT SUBSCRIPTIONS >
DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTIONS >
subscriber services >
Everyone’s favorite line-building, time-wasting, procrastination aid video game turns 25 on Saturday. Yep, our friend Tetris is a quarter of a century old. Although technology has certainly advanced in 25 years, gameplay really hasn’t changed much at all. And why should it? The beauty is in its simplicity. But that’s not to say that marketers haven’t tried to change the game – below, you’ll find 10 variations on Tetris that have entered the market over the years. But you’ll notice it’s the original that still endures.
1. Hatris. In case the plain old blocks were a little too dull for you, Hatris provided you with the opportunity to stack different types of hats instead. Wizard hats, top hats, crowns… whatever the variation was, you had to stack five alike hats in a row to get them to disappear.
2. Faces. I had this one and I loved it. Each block that fell had an element of a face on it and you had to stack the pieces that went together to make the whole face go away and get points. Some of the faces were famous, so you should have had an easier time putting them together… except a misprint in the booklet that went with the game messed up the images of two important people. “The pictures of George Washington Carver and Frederick Douglass (pp. 8 and 18) were inexplicably reversed. Please do not use their images as references for a U.S. History class,” the insert explained.
3. Tetris Elements. Picture the design-a-disaster element from Sim City and there you have it. Five game variations offer five ways to destroy your hard work – “Stratosphere” had meteors, “Earthquake” featured tremors, “Tempest” switched between screens at inopportune times, “Ice” had falling icicles and “Fire” had intense heat that would melt rows.
4. Tetris Plus included a little professor guy that you needed to get to the bottom of the screen. The game starts with pre-placed tetrominoes, so it wasn’t as easy as just starting the game and letting him drop. There’s a decidedly evil element to this game – instead of just hitting the top and losing the game like usual, a loss in this game happened when the professor’s skull came into contact with the metal spikes at the top of the playing field. Whoops.
5. Welltris. It was just like Tetris but with different dimensions. Imagine that you’re looking down into a well – go figure, right? The tetrominoes fell down the sides of the well, giving the player all four sides to work with to get the pieces into position to eliminate lines. And – bonus – you also got to view “beautiful background scenes of modern Russian culture.”
6. Tetris: The GrandMaster was for serious players only. If regular Tetris was just too simple for you, even at level 50, then GrandMaster may have been up your alley. Once you reached a certain level (500, to be exact), the pieces were no longer airborne – they just appeared at the lowest level on the screen and the player only has a split second to move it before it was just locked into the place it appeared. The highest level was 999, at which point the player achieved the GrandMaster status.
7. Tetris Worlds included a backstory about a planet called Hadar 4, objects called Tetrions and little beings called Minos. To rescue the Minos from Hadar 4 as it has become uninhabitable, and to do so, you have to – well, play Tetris. Their story is a little more convoluted than that, but that’s the drift. The fun part comes in with the variations, including “Sticky Tetris,” “Fusion Tetris” and “Hot-Line” Tetris.
8. Tetris Splash is relatively new compared to the others – it just came out in 2007. As you can probably guess, it has a water theme: aquarium-like graphics and watery-sounding music. Players get to choose between saltwater and freshwater and could originally download fish bundles for 62 cents each. Four “décor” packs – Pirates, Atlantis, Graveyard and Scuba – were also available for $1.87.
9. Tetris Party is the newest addition to the Tetris family and is available via WiiWare for the Wii. I had no idea this existed and now I’m pretty sure I have to have it. You can play in several different modes, even using the Balance Board in one of them, which sounds really hard. You can also play co-op – working together to clear lines – and Stage Racer, in which the player guides a single tetrimino through a narrow maze without touching any walls.
10. Tetris 1-D. This isn’t an official Tetris game, but I kind of got a kick out of it. Check it out for yourself.
Has anyone played any of these? Or do you have fond memories of playing Tetris for days on end? Share in the comments! I can tell you that my cell phone version of Tetris definitely got me through boring lectures in college on multiple occasions.
Comments (28)
Comment
- Follow mental_floss
My mom, a 67 year old Japanese lady, has literally worn out three Game Boys playing Tetris (the original)!
posted by Nancy on 6-4-2009 at 3:53 pm
You forgot Wordtris!
posted by Devin on 6-4-2009 at 4:00 pm
I love the list, but you left out Tetrisphere, a stressful ball of a game, and the more loosely-based Wetrix, requiring water-tight skillz! How I came to own these Nintendo 64 games shall forever remain a personal mystery.
posted by Southpaw Jones on 6-4-2009 at 4:07 pm
Dr. Mario comes to mind.
posted by Witty Nickname on 6-4-2009 at 4:09 pm
my favorite was the tetris for the N64 where if you made 4×4 squares, they would turn into silver (or gold) solid squares and you would get more points for busting those lines. i use to play that game for hours…i was pretty awesome at it.
posted by andy on 6-4-2009 at 4:16 pm
Seconding Witty Nickname on Dr. Mario – the blocks were pills and you had to line up the colored halves, if I remember correctly.
posted by Casey on 6-4-2009 at 4:26 pm
What kept me going through high school was tetris on the TI graphing calculators…before cell phones had the capability for games. Students would be battling through the connectivity of the TI calculators during class.
posted by singdancesteal on 6-4-2009 at 4:43 pm
Ahem. I still play ‘The New Tetris’ on my N64. And I LOVED Welltris. Best games ever.
posted by Rachel on 6-4-2009 at 4:51 pm
I used to play that game so much that I had visions of it going on in my head whenever I wasn’t actually playing it.
posted by Heather on 6-4-2009 at 4:54 pm
Tetris 1d has to be one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while.
posted by Steve on 6-4-2009 at 4:57 pm
Dr. Mario is the BEST! We still have an original Nintendo and Dr. Mario cassette. Dr. Mario can be found on Brain Age 2.
I played original Tetris too, until I would dream at night that blocks were falling from the sky and I had to run, catch and arrange them. That’s not weird, is it? (Dang, I think it is…..)
At one point, I also had an adult version of Tetris featuring posed people. I’ll leave it at that…
~Bethy
posted by Bethy on 6-4-2009 at 5:17 pm
I just got Dr. Mario on WiiWare, I have hooked my husband and we play head to head till 3AM!!
WWWWAAAAYYYYYYY too addictive, just like it was way back when!
posted by momofbug on 6-4-2009 at 5:31 pm
What about Tetrisphere or the Disney Tetris Challenge?
I played both on my N64 back in the day.
posted by Shayla on 6-4-2009 at 5:42 pm
The Monty Python & the Quest for the Holy Grail computer game included a version of Tetris. The field was a pit, the blocks dead folks (that darn plague) that were carted over the abyss, and included the occasional fellow screaming “I’m not dead!” and refusing to stay in place. Classic.
posted by Enika on 6-4-2009 at 6:08 pm
I absolutely loved Tetris Plus and Dr. Mario and wish I still had both!
When I still had a Wii, I had Tetris Party… the game is especially fun in the vs. mode, where you can use items to attack your opponent.
posted by Angel on 6-4-2009 at 7:15 pm
Bigidea.com has a Veggie Tales version of Tetris (appropriately called “Veggie Pile-up”) that’s lots of fun (link on my name). The blocks are in the shapes of the characters (ex. Bob the Tomato is the square piece). Totally cute!
@Bethy – Don’t worry, you’re not alone. I used to dream in Tetris all the time!
posted by Lynley on 6-4-2009 at 8:16 pm
Ok, if you like perverted things…back in college there was a version that had naked men and women in various poses. When you got 2 together in a possible sexual position (either opposite or same sex), they would go through the motions and then disappear. Its been a few years since I’ve seen it but it was a good laugh when people finally realized how to play.
(lol my special ‘code’ to get this to post is ‘cover it’….very appropriate :))
posted by Mindy on 6-4-2009 at 8:20 pm
Yay, I’m so glad Mindy was the first to mention Sextris (as it was called). We played that all the time in college!!
Also, I’m addicted to Dr. Mario.
posted by Caroline on 6-4-2009 at 8:54 pm
what about tetrinet?
posted by anonymous on 6-4-2009 at 9:16 pm
I can remember in high school playing tetris on my TI-83 calculator, that was always a good time.
Sometime later I came across a website: 3dtris.de and it is tetris in 3D. That kept me entertained for several hours on end a few times.
posted by Becky on 6-4-2009 at 9:40 pm
In elementary school, my friends and I were crazy about NES games (OK, so we still are) and one birthday I got the Tetris board game. Yes it’s as ridiculous as it sounds! And yet, when we lost our Nintendo priveleges, you’re darn right we pulled it out.
posted by Nathan R on 6-4-2009 at 10:07 pm
Sextris fiends… link in name. You’re welcome :)
recaptcha: “Piously and”
posted by stacy on 6-4-2009 at 10:57 pm
You missed out Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine for the Sega Mega Drive.
I also had it on my PS2 on one of those sonic collections. Me and my mate would spend literally hours playing against each other until the living room descended into a pile of snacks and beer cans and we couldn’t actually move.
We had l33t skillz at that game after a month or so!
posted by Chris on 6-4-2009 at 11:38 pm
If you can see Magic Eye pictures, try stereogram tetris (linked in my name). It’s pretty tough.
posted by Sammy on 6-5-2009 at 3:02 am
We have Wetrix for our N64 (yeah, we are a bit behind). One of my favorites was Block Out for Sega Genisis. As a teen, we would stay up alllll night playing that. It was totally addicting.
ReCapcha: recess grand (I’ll say!)
posted by Rissa on 6-5-2009 at 9:11 am
@ Enika
Seriously? A Monty Python Tetris? Now that is too awesome. I am going to have to find that. And become addicted. And make all my equally nerdy Python friends jealous.
posted by Hastings on 6-5-2009 at 12:03 pm
Dr. Mario is cool… no doubt about it.
posted by Dan the Music Master on 6-11-2009 at 11:05 am
I had a version on PC where each level was a different drug trip. STarted with caffeine, progressed to Ganja, LSD, etc. Levels were in psychadelic colors, sometimes sideways, the last one was backwards and upside down…
It was fun, can’t remember what it was called.
posted by Sam on 11-19-2009 at 2:31 pm