The Game Boy, which saved my sanity on possibly the longest car trip ever in history, was the only video game I owned in the summer of ’91. My dad was driving, and I was crammed in the backseat with my little brother Jake for a 17 hour drive to Kansas to visit relatives — you know, the obligatory family trip that everyone always does because that’s what families do. We were arguing about every single subject for about six hours straight when Dad pulled into some truck stop near the Colorado-Nebraska border, disappeared into the building and came out with a grey plastic brick and one cartridge. “Find a way to split this or we are turning around,” Dad said, tossing it at us like we were animals competing for raw meat.
The game was Tetris, although I didn’t realise that at first. I mean, it’s just blocks falling down, right? Where are the bad guys? Where’s Mario? Why stack geometric shapes when you could be jumping on mushrooms or shooting aliens? However, Jake took it first (younger = gets dibs) and quickly became totally engrossed, grumbling under his breath, “Come on, give me a straight one!” Every so often, he’d hand it off to me, and I thought I’d humor him for a bit before demanding we stop and get a “real” game.
Three hours went by and I am still playing. Totally hooked. There’s something about the way those pieces — tetrominoes, I’d learn later, but back then, we just called them “the shapes” — fit together that clicked in my brain. The music that has stayed in my head forever — a Russian folk tune called “Korobeiniki” — became the background noise for the rest of our drive. Jake and I developed an unwritten agreement to take turns playing. No arguing; no fighting over whose turn it was. We were united in our pursuit of beating each other’s scores.
By the time we reached Kansas, Jake and I had gotten pretty good at the game. Jake liked to play aggressively, using what I now know as “going for tetrises” — clearing four lines at once by leaving a well on one side and waiting for that straight piece. A very risky strategy for a twelve year old, but when it worked, Jake would get this smug expression on his face and loudly announce his point total. I, on the other hand, played it safe and kept everything flat and even. Maybe a bit dull, but I lasted longer. Jake and I had also developed our own terminology — the zigzag-shaped pieces were called “snakes”, the L-shaped ones were “corners”, and the T-shaped one was simply “that weird one”.
The Tetris effect hit me hard in the first year of owning the game, even though I didn’t know it had a name back then. I would fall asleep and dream of falling blocks. I would arrange my school supplies in Tetris-like configurations without even realising I was doing it. Even in math class, I’d find myself rearranging numbers in my homework to create neat rows, hoping to “clear” them like Tetris lines. My mom thought I was losing it when she found me reorganizing the pantry to maximize the efficiency of my canned goods storage.
How do you tell your mom that a video game has reprogrammed your brain to see the world as a spatial puzzle?
In college, I acquired the NES version of Tetris, and it felt like a completely different game, even though it was essentially the same. The colours made everything pop more, the controller felt snappier than the mushy Game Boy buttons, and somehow the entire experience felt more “official”. My roommate Matt had the console, and we would pass the controller back and forth during study breaks that would inevitably turn into three-hour marathon gaming sessions. We would analyze the minute details of the game like we were scholars, comparing and contrasting things such as how the randomization worked differently, how the piece rotation worked better, how the music sounded fuller through actual speakers rather than the tiny Game Boy speaker.
I discovered that my Professor of Victorian Literature was also a Tetris fan when I spotted a Game Boy sticking out of his briefcase after class one day. Dr. Henderson, a tweedy academic who had spent the previous hour explaining the moral implications behind George Eliot novels, was apparently sneaking in Tetris sessions between classes. When our eyes met over the evidence, there was a fleeting moment of mutual understanding — like we had discovered we were members of the same secret society. “Do you prefer Type A or Type B music?”, Dr. Henderson asked without skipping a beat. “Type A”, I replied. He shook his head in dismay. “You’ll eventually move to Type B. Everyone does”.
This conversation led me to do some research in the computer lab during finals week — instead of studying for my Economics final, I spent hours researching Alexey Pajitnov and the story of how this Soviet programmer created a game so perfect that it broke through the Cold War. The music in the game was based on a traditional Russian folk song called “Korobeiniki”, which blew my mind. Here was a game that had become a part of American pop culture, and it was built on Russian foundations. I thought it was poetic, although I was probably reading too much into it because I was avoiding studying macroeconomics.
After I graduated, Tetris became my go-to source of stress relief. First apartment in Denver, basically no furniture, but I had a TV and an NES set up on day one. After working long days to learn the construction trade from scratch — and trust me, the first couple of years were brutal — I would come home and play Tetris for what I told myself would be a quick 15-minute session. Next thing I knew, it was 2AM and I had a 6AM start time. The meditative quality of stacking blocks somehow balanced the chaos of figuring out adult life in a new city.
I didn’t discover competitive Tetris existed until about 2010 when I stumbled upon tournament videos online. Watching these masters execute moves I had never even heard of — T-spins, optimal stacking techniques, achieving speeds that seemed physiologically impossible — was both inspiring and humbling. I had been playing this game for 20 years, and apparently I knew nothing about advanced strategy. I started practicing more deliberately after that, but my 40-something reflexes wouldn’t exactly help me win any tournaments. Still, becoming a more efficient player became a new passion, like mastering a new skill after discovering you had been tying your shoes incorrectly your whole life.
Smartphones brought Tetris back into my daily routine big time. Having it available during lunch breaks, waiting for appointments, or those awkward minutes before meetings begin, allowed me to play Tetris more regularly than I had since college. Each app had their own quirks — some with new graphics, others with new modes/feature — but the core of the game remained beautiful and unchanged. How many games from 1984 are still perfectly playable today without any updates? It’s like Chess or Checkers — the design was so solid that it doesn’t require updates.
My daughter discovered Tetris the same way I did, minus the sibling rivalry. I may have unintentionally left the Tetris Effect running on the Switch one afternoon when my daughter was about 8 and I stepped away to grab a beer while leaving the controller out in plain sight. She pounced on it immediately and had that same intense focus I remembered seeing in myself while playing. Now, she consistently beats my score, which is both a proud-dad feeling and a slight embarrassment. The torch has been passed, but she plays with methods I never used and strategies I don’t even understand.
During the Pandemic Years, I began playing Tetris again at levels I hadn’t seen since those late nights in college. With the slowdown in my construction work and the resulting abundance of free time in my house, those familiar falling blocks became a means of managing my stress. My phone’s screen time reports were somewhat eye-opening — I averaged over two hours per day on different Tetris Apps — but as coping mechanisms go, organising geometric shapes seems a heck of a lot healthier than some alternative options I could’ve chosen. While I was on video calls with friends from work, I discovered that many of them had also returned to Tetris during the Lockdown. We called it comfort gaming.
Currently, the main opponent I compete against is myself. Can I still match last year’s scores? Can I perform that T-spin technique I’ve been practicing? My reflexes aren’t what they were at 25, but my ability to recognise patterns has grown exponentially with practice. The game has adapted with me, or perhaps I’ve adapted with it. Either way, we remain compatible.
Those who don’t game sometimes ask me what keeps me returning to something so simplistic for so long. “It’s just falling blocks for thirty years?”, they say. And yes, viewed that way it appears absurd. Yet, there is something elegant about Tetris that is difficult to describe unless you have personally experienced it. It is perfectly balanced — easy to learn in minutes, impossible to completely master. The thrill of executing a series of blocks in a row, the flow state achieved when your hands and brain synchronize and bypass conscious thought, that instant when four lines clear at once and you get that small burst of dopamine… it is gaming reduced to its most fundamental level.
Still draw Tetris pieces during boring meetings, which likely says a great deal about my attention span but whatever. During a particularly monotonous safety briefing last month, I found myself drawing out sequence of Tetris pieces in the margins of my notes. The person sitting next to me looked over at my scribbles and smiled. “Tetris?”, he asked quietly. When I nodded, he revealed his own Tetris sketches — perfectly rendered tetrominoes arranged to clear lines. That short exchange of acknowledgement about this simple game somehow made the entire meeting tolerable. For many of us, Tetris has become more than entertainment — it has become a common language.
Will I still be playing in another thirty years? Assuming my hands and eyes continue to function, and assuming I can continue to track falling objects, likely. The platform may change — perhaps virtual reality, perhaps some type of neural interface, perhaps something we cannot even envision yet. But those seven shapes will continue to fall, require organization, and provide that perfect balance of structure and chaos that has held me captive for three decades. As a world becomes increasingly complex, there is something comforting in knowing that Tetris remains precisely the same. Seven pieces, clear the lines, don’t allow it to reach the top. Simple rules, infinite opportunities. That has been sufficient for three decades, and it will be sufficient for three more.
Timothy discovered retro gaming at forty and never looked back. A construction foreman by day and collector by night, he writes from a fresh, nostalgia-free angle—exploring classic games with adult curiosity, honest takes, and zero childhood bias.
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