Tetris. What a game. So simple and yet so addictive. Different types of blocks fall down and have to be put in the right position. If you manage to form a closed line, you get points and the row you formed disappears. But the layer of blocks gets higher if you make mistakes. As the music gets louder and the blocks come down faster, the wall gets higher and higher, until the top of the play screen is reached and the dreaded words ‘game overappear on screen. Grrr. Again. There goes the music again: tun dun dun dun dun dun dun.
Like many other millennials, I fell under the spell of Tetris as a child, on Nintendo’s Game Boy handheld game console, sometime in the early 1990s. Many years later it appears that music (‘Korobejniki’, based on a Russian song from the nineteenth century) is still etched in my brain. Composer Hirokazu Tanaka’s bleep version was partly responsible for the nostalgic kick I got when I recently replayed the game.
Tetris is back in the spotlight thanks to a feature film which recently appeared on Apple TV+, the relatively modest Netflix competitor of tech giant Apple. The film is about the battle for rights that arose in the late eighties. The Russian Aleksej Pazjitnov invented the game in 1984. The film shows how the Dutch entrepreneur Henk Rogers negotiated in the Soviet Union and managed to win the distribution rights. Pazhitnov and Rogers later formed The Tetris Company to protect those rights.
New game techniques
The impact of Tetris is still noticeable: an awful lot of legal and less legal versions have been released, on all kinds of devices. There were even cool calculators that you could play Tetris variants on. A few years ago there was a dance performance called Tetris Mon Amour. In Flanders is the TV quiz Blocksin which participants play a variant of Tetris, still popular after thousands of episodes.
If you watch the trailer of the film, you will notice that the makers are full of eighties nostalgia. But young people who were not even born in the heyday have also embraced the game. This is how a new generation plays in real Tetris Championships where players compete against each other in one-on-one matches on the classic Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). In recent years, a revolution has been taking place in this competitive world: during the Classic Tetris World Championships, young players from Generation Z rule the roost, thanks to new playing techniques called ‘hypertapping’ and ‘rolling’. They hold the controller with which they control the game in a special way and can play much faster and achieve higher scores. In a YouTube video from 2018 shows how the then 16-year-old Joseph Saelee beats multiple champion Jonas Neubauer thanks to such a new playing technique.
Since then it has been accelerating and my eyes can barely keep up with the insane pace of the blocks. That simple game suddenly seems like top sport. It is sometimes said that Gen Z people don’t work hard enough. Watch the Tetris Championships and you’ll know better.