The Game Boy kept me sane during what might have been the longest car trip in recorded history. I didn’t own any video games that summer of ‘91 aside from Tetris. Dad was driving cross-country from New Jersey to Kansas to visit relatives. You know, the quintessential family vacation that everybody takes because that’s what families did back then. My brother Jake and I were fighting about everything and nothing for six hours straight when Dad pulled over at some truck stop just outside of Colorado.
Dad walked into the building and returned with a grey plastic brick and one cartridge. “Split this thing or we are turning back around,” Dad said before tossing it at us like feed for pups. It was Tetris, although neither Jake nor I knew it at the time. It’s just blocks falling down the screen. Where’s the bad guy? Where’s Mario!? Why would you spend your time stacking silly shapes when you could be jumping on mushrooms and blasting aliens? !
Jake grabbed the system first (younger brother = gets to go first) and was immediately transfixed, muttering to himself, “Come on, give me a straight one!” Occasionally he would hand it to me and I would play for a few minutes before deciding I would let him play longer this time if we just stopped and got a “real game.”
Three hours later, I’m still playing non-stop. I was hooked. Something about those pieces clicking into place just made sense to me. That song everyone knows as the Tetris theme (“Korobeiniki,” a Russian folk song) became the soundtrack of our journey. Jake and I silently agreed to take turns playing. No more bickering, no more fighting over who got control. We were now partners in our shared obsession with trying to top each other.
By the time we arrived in Kansas, Jake and I could pretty much play alongside each other without any issues. He was aggressive, trying for what I didn’t know at the time was called “going for tetrises” (setting yourself up for four-line clears by stacking a well on one side and patiently waiting for the I piece). He was also 12, so attempting such a risky strategy usually ended in frustration. When he would successfully tee off and clear four lines at once, he’d grin from ear to ear and loudly proclaim his new high score. I was methodical and tried to keep the playing field as flat as possible. Boring? Maybe. But damn did it work. We even created our own names for the tetrominoes. The S piece was simply called “snake,” while Jake deemed the Z piece “turtle” because it “runs into its shell when it gets scared.” The L piece was “corner,” while its rotated counterpart was “hook.” Even the O piece had an alias – “snowman.” We called the T piece “that weird one.”
I experienced full-on Tetris effect flashbacks that first year I owned the game. Blocks dreamed about falling asleep. I would arrange pencils and pens on my desk in Tetris formations without even thinking about it. During class I would catch myself lining up problems in my homework so that I could “clear” the line. One time my mother thought I was crazy when she walked into my room and saw me moving all the cans in our pantry so that they would stack more Tetris-like.
How do you explain the Tetris Effect to your mother?
I bought a copy of Tetris for the NES in college and it felt like I was playing a completely different game. Colours were crisper and brighter, the controller had more snap to it than those suckers on the Game Boy, it even felt more “official” this time around. My roommate Matt owned it and we constantly swapped the controller back and forth during our “study sessions” that usually lasted three hours. We picked apart every aspect of how the two games played differently like college students should — comparing randomizer algorithms, how piece rotation worked smoother, how packed the music sounded coming from an actual speaker.
I found out my Professor of Victorian Literature was a Tetris fanatic when I noticed his Game Boy protruding from his messenger bag as he walked away from class. Dr. Henderson, an old school professor with a salt-n-pepa afro who had spent the last hour enthusiastically lecturing on the symbolic nature of George Eliot’s use of dress, was playing goddamn Tetris between classes. I looked down at my hands clutching the lecture notes I had no intention of reading and back up at him until our eyes met over the ruins of our higher education. In that instant, he and I both understood that we were part of something special. Members of an elite club that no one else in the room would ever know about. “Type A or Type B?”, Henderson asked rhetorically without breaking eye contact. “Type A,” I replied. He chuckled and shook his head disappointed. “Stick with it, you’ll end up a type B. Everyone does.”
Instead of doing research, I spent my study hours in the computer lab googling Alexey Pajitnov and the history behind how this Soviet software engineer designed the perfect game and somehow managed to bridge the gap between East and West during the Cold War. Turns out that the music he wrote for the game was based on a Russian folk song called “Korobeiniki.” The irony was not lost on me.
When I first moved to Denver after college I spent my paychecks on booze and Tetris. First apartment, we didn’t even have any furniture but I bought a TV and hooked up the NES the moment we moved in. Working long days learning how to be a tradesman with little prior experience (spoiler alert: your first 2-3 years suck), I would come home and play in order to de-stress. told myself I would only play for a few minutes until I sobered up from the day, but next thing you know it’s 2AM and I have to be at work by six. It’s amazing how calming it is to stack those blocks after a mind-numbing day of laying brick.
I didn’t learn about competitive Tetris until around 2010 when I discovered tournament footage on Youtube. Watching professionals play at speeds I didn’t know were humanly possible while effortlessly executing maneuvers I had no idea existed (looking at you T-Spinners…) was astonishing. Here I had spent the last two decades playing what I thought was the greatest game of all time, and now I learned that there was an entire genre of strategy I knew nothing about. I began working at being a better, more efficient player, but my aged out reflexes wouldn’t allow me to compete with anyone except myself. Becoming a better Tetris player became my new obsession. Sort of like learning you’ve been tying your shoes wrong your whole life, only to discover a whole new world of bunny ears.
Smartphones have allowed me to fully embrace Tetris once again. With new games readily available at my finger tips during lunch, waiting for appointments, or those first few minutes of a meeting when everyone is drawing in their notebooks, I found myself playing everyday. Sure, they all play slightly differently. Some have you fancy graphics, some have unique game modes/features. But at their core, they are all just as addictive as the original Game Boy version. How many games from 1984 are you still playing today without any updates or new features? Chess? Checkers? Tetris.
My daughter was introduced to Tetris the same way I was…except for the fighting part. I somehow must have Tetris Effect going in the background because one afternoon my daughter was 8 years old and I walked away from the Switch for like ten minutes to grab a beer. I came back, turned it off and tv back on to find my little destroying my high score. She played with the same intensity and concentration I remembered experiencing as a kid. These days, she regularly beats my score which simultaneously feels like the proudest dad feeling and the shittest dad feeling at the same time. She’s good, and I don’t just mean at Tetris. She has techniques I would have never thought of, speeds I will never comprehend. The torch has been passed, but man, does she crush me.
COVID happened and once again, Tetris became my goto method of relieving stress. Life in construction came to a grinding halt and I found myself with more free time inside my own home than I knew what to do with. Falling blocks to the rescue. My phone screen time report actually opened my eyes to how much I played. Over two hours a day on various Tetris Apps? Insane. But hey, when you’re looking for ways to cope with something that’s affecting the entire planet…organising falling blocks kind of seems healthier than other choices I could be making. I’m also fortunate enough to work with a group of friends who, like me, started playing Tetris again during the pandemic. We dubbed it comfort gaming.
These days I have really only myself to compete with. How fast can I match yesterdays high score? Can I land that T-spin I have been practicing? Sure, my hands aren’t what they used to be but my brain has caught up. I see the patterns quicker now and can plan my strategy well in advance of those pieces hitting the top. Tetris has evolved with me, or maybe I have evolved with Tetris. Doesn’t matter. We still fit together.
People who don’t play video games often ask me what I still find in Tetris that has me playing it thirty years later. “It’s just falling blocks,” they say. Played for thirty years? Come on man, thats stupid. Sure, when you look at it that way it is downright ludicrous. But there is elegance in Tetris that is hard to explain if you haven’t spent hours on end playing. It’s perfectly balanced. It’s easy to pick up and play, yet you will never know everything there is to know about it. The rush you get after completing multiple lines in a row, getting into that_zone where your hands just know where to go without you having to think about it, clearing four lines at once and watching that tiny burst of dopamine flood your brain… it’s video games distilled into their purest form.
Still doodle Tetris pieces during meetings. What that says about me I don’t know, but ah well. We were sitting in a ridiculous safety meeting last month and I found myself drawing one of the longest Tetris combos I could think of in the margins of my notepad. The guy next to me peeked over at my doodles and smiled. Quietly mumbled “Tetris?” Under my breath, I affirmed he was correct. He whipped out his own masterpiece of interconnected tetrominoes designed to clear as many lines as possible. We shared a look of fellow Tetris enthusiasts and I actually enjoyed the rest of that stupid meeting. Tetris has become its own form of communication between players.
Will I still be playing another 30 years from now? If my hands and eyes work, and if I can still track fast enough to play, hell yeah I will. Maybe I’ll be playing it on some sort of virtual reality headset. Maybe I’ll have it plugged directly into my brain with those newfangled neurological connector things. Or maybe we’ll invent some type of technology in the future that we can’t even fathom right now. Doesn’t matter. Those seven shapes will always fall, they’ll always need to be organised, and they will always give us that perfect blend of order and chaos that first captured me 30 years ago. The world may become crazier as time goes on, but at least we will always have Tetris.
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.
0 Comments