#backloggery

Klax was originally meant to be the follow-up to Atari’s popular arcade conversion of Tetris, but ended up becoming more of its own thing due to the legal dispute.  Like Tetris and Columns, Klax has tiles coming from the top of the screen (though it’s a bit visually distinct from the others in that they’re actually tumbling down a conveyor belt).  The difference is how you control them, and it is actually a pretty major difference.  You don’t have any control over the tiles until they land on the paddle you control at the bottom of the screen.

You use this to catch them and arrange them in the 5 by 5 well below.  The paddle can hold up to five tiles at once and places them starting from the top of the stack.  It is also possible to bounce pieces back up the conveyor belt and catch them again if you need to shift your pieces around, but attempting to juggle them this way can cause further complications if you’re not careful.  Any pieces that aren’t caught by the paddle are considered drops.  Running out of drops or completely filling up the well results in a game over.

The paddle is used to create vertical, horizontal, or diagonal lines of at least three, known as a Klax.  Verticals are worth the least amount of points and diagonals are worth the most.  Certain moves such as getting lines of four or five or getting multiple lines (such two diagonals at once) with one piece counts for more Klaxes than normal.  Also like in Columns, it is possible to achieve combos, though because of the smaller well of pieces they can’t be quite as long.  Of course, the longer you play the faster and more numerous the pieces get.  They also start appearing in more colors.  There are also flashing wildcard pieces that can easily be used to get multiple Klaxes in one move.

The major gameplay distinction Klax has over Tetris is the way it is structured overall.  The gameplay is divided into 100 waves (making this a rare puzzle game that doesn’t actually go on forever).  Each wave is cleared by fulfilling a set goal, such as getting a certain number of Klaxes or getting a certain number of points.  After clearing a wave, you are awarded bonus points for the amount of pieces remaining on the conveyor belt and the paddle and for the amount of empty space you left in the well.  Before the first wave and every five waves after, you’re given the option to skip five or ten waves.  Doing so gives you a point bonus and more drops.  Also, during a couple of the early waves, you are given the opportunity to skip 45 entire waves by creating a large X (five piece long diagonal lines going in both directions).  Doing so is easier said than done, of course.

Visually, this has got to be the most 90s puzzle game of all time.  Many versions of the game even open with the quote at the top of the article.  The title screen of the Lynx version has the hand that is typically the K in the logo signing the rest of the letters to make the colorful, multi-hued logo appear before assuming its place as the K.  The background of the title screen consists of a pattern of shapes typical of 90s visuals.  As mentioned above, instead of just dropping down a well like many other games of this type, Klax has the pieces tumbling end over end down a conveyor belt toward your paddle.  The backgrounds, which change after every wave, are sometimes abstract and psychedelic.  My favorite of the early ones is the one that has a large hand wrapping around the bottom of the conveyor belt as if it were the neck of a guitar.  It’s also definitely worth noting that this is one of the games that requires you to rotate your Lynx so that it is in a portrait aspect ratio, which makes sense considering how the screen is laid out.

Unfortunately, in most of the versions I’ve seen including the Lynx version, there is no music during the gameplay.  The sole song seems to be the bassy track that plays during the title screen.  It’s a different song than the one that plays on the NES one for example, and not as good in my opinion.  But it does somewhat make up for the lack of music with a wider array of sound effects than one might expect from a game of this type.  Each different color of piece also makes a different sound as it makes its way down the belt.  The brown pieces even make kind of a splat sound, which I’m not sure was intended as a joke or not.  There’s also voice clips that play announcing what type of wave the upcoming one is and reacting when you pull off long Klaxes or combos.  For such a small system, these voice samples actually sound very impressive.

Overall, this definitely one of the most unique and enjoyable puzzle games I’ve played so far.  It does get pretty hectic very quickly though, since in addition to the pieces coming down you also have to pay attention not only to the pieces already in the well but also the way the pieces on your paddle are arranged.  It’s just a little bit more to keep track of that makes the game that much more difficult.  But hey, I’m not great at these games as it is, so maybe it’s just me.  Anyway, for the next entry, we’ll be moving to the game that sent us through this puzzle game gauntlet in the first place: Dr. Mario.

The story of the game is very simple for a visual novel and I’m assuming there has to be some more context given in the manual (which I wasn’t able to find any scans of) since the game starts you off in the middle of the action and never really fully tells you what’s going on.  The notes that came with the fan translation establish that you are searching for your two friends, whose interstellar shuttle has mysteriously disappeared.  While searching for them, you are ambushed by a space dragon (which is where the game picks up) and rescued by a mysterious woman named Jean.  You spend the game traveling between a few different planets searching for your friends.  It’s an extremely short and bare-bones story, almost feeling like they established the framework for a story and never really filled it out with anything substantial.  You can see everything the game has to offer in terms of its script inside of an hour.  It’s honestly pretty bad.

More than any of the other games I’ve played so far, this one makes use of a point-and-click interface.  All of the commands (look, talk, use, etc.) are executed based on the position of your cursor on the screen.  The commands themselves are toggled by holding the B button and using the D-pad.  It’s a bit clunky but not nearly as unintuitive as the controls for the move command.  When you select move you can toggle between different destinations represented as arrows on the screen.  You’re actually meant to press B to cycle through these, but when I first started the game and was trying to figure the controls out, I thought that maybe you need to hold B and use the D-pad (since the D-pad by itself does nothing).  And this does actually visually cycle between the different destinations but does not actually select them, leading to a confusing moment where I thought both exits from one of the early areas led to the same place. 

As I stated above, the game is very short and it seems like the strategy Square used to pad out the length is a couple of maze sections (one when navigating the depths of space and one when navigating Alias’s desert moon).  But they aren’t real mazes like the ones in Portopia or Princess Tomato.  It’s more like a series of screens that look exactly the same that give you three directions to go in.  Since you can’t really tell where you are or where you’re supposed to be going, you just kind of have to bumble around until you find your destination.  The closest thing it really has to tough puzzles is a sequence where if you do anything but use your gun on a character, they immediately kill you.  But you can continue again from right outside the room where that takes place so it’s no big deal anyway.

The character designs of the game were actually done by none other than Sunrise (known for Gundam, Cowboy Bebop, etc.) and they look fine for the most part.  The character portraits are the only thing in the game that look halfway decent.  All of the background art, which is what you’re looking at for most of the game, looks very crude.  The only character graphics which I don’t like at all are Jean’s, which have an atrocious white and bright teal color palette.  The game has only minimal sound effects and only one song that plays during the title screen.  The sole piece of music in the game is actually pretty good though, one of Nobuo Uematsu’s earliest music credits.

So, obviously I don’t care for this game very much.  But it’s just because there’s nothing to it.  It offers nothing substantial in terms of story, characters, gameplay, graphics, sound, or anything else.  Hell, I barely have anything to say about it at all.  But it’s short and it’s one of Square’s earliest games, so maybe it’s interesting as an oddity?  I dunno, but next time I’ll be playing something with much more meat to it, mostly because it’s actually a compilation including six different games - Jake Hunter Detective Story: Memories of the Past.  Until then, take it easy~

During his time as a journalist for a video game column for Shonen Jump, Yuji Horii entered a game programming contest held by the then brand new company, Enix, in order to source talented developers and build their initial library of games.  Horii managed to place in this contest with Love Match Tennis.  Another big player also came out of the contest in the form of Koichi Nakamura with his puzzle game, Door Door, which featured a player character named Chun, who ended up becoming the namesake of Nakamura’s development contracting company, Chunsoft.  Together, the winners of the contest all used their prize, a trip to the United States, to attend the 1983 Applefest in San Francisco.  It was here that Horii encountered the western computer RPG, Wizardry, which proves to be very important later.

Soon after Enix’s initial spree of releasing all of the contest games for a wide variety of Japanese PCs, Horii ended up working on Portopia.  He derived the concept of the game after reading in a PC magazine about interactive fiction games in the west, such as Zork, and deciding it was an untapped market in Japan.  Portopia was designed to be his take on that genre, even featuring a simple “verb noun” text parser.  One of his major additions to that style of game was graphics depicting the current scene in the story: the “visual” part of “visual novel.”  He also wanted to use the opportunity to experiment with more non-linear storytelling, which was sorely lacking in Japanese games at the time.  The game was programmed in BASIC and released for various Japanese PCs over the course of 1983 and 1984 to great success, laying the foundation for the entire visual novel genre.  A lot of early visual novels even share the mystery theme of this one.

After the Famicom was released and Enix started porting some of their games to it, Horii wanted to make a game in the style of Wizardry for it.  However, Enix felt that the Famicom was still too much of an action platform compared to PCs and they weren’t sure how well a game of that type would do.  So, it was decided to first go with the cheaper option of porting Portopia to the Famicom to see how a more adventure-oriented game fared in that market.  Horii teamed up with Nakamura’s Chunsoft and work on the port began.  One of the major additions to this version was an underground maze section in the style of the Wizardry games used to test the Famicom’s ability to handle something like this.  Upon release, the Famicom version of Portopia, of course, also did extremely well and Horii was allowed to work on Dragon Quest along with Chunsoft, which itself became the template for all future JRPGs.  So, in addition to kicking off the visual novel genre, its continued success ultimately led to what we now think of as a JRPG.  Granted, Dragon Quest isn’t the very first Japanese RPG, The Black Onyx predates it by a few years for example, but it was certainly the most influential.  And hell, if that weren’t enough, Portopia is also one of the games that inspired Hideo Kojima of Metal Gear fame to enter the game development scene after he was moved by its storytelling.

The story of the game itself (as told in the manual, since the game itself starts off with the case already having begun with no immediate context) is that Kouzou Yamakawa, the president of a loan shark company in Kobe, was found in his home by his secretary and security guard, dead from a stab wound to the neck.  Because he was found in a room that was locked from the inside, the obvious conclusion is that it was a suicide, but owing to his position, the man did have a lot of enemies, so it falls to you, an unnamed veteran homicide detective to investigate.  You spend the game searching the murder site and the surrounding cities, gathering clues, interviewing suspects, and establishing motives, hoping to determine the culprit of the crime, if there even is one.  It’s a classic sealed-room murder mystery.

As you explore the game and perform your investigation, it is actually your subordinate Yasuhiko Mano (or Yasu for short) through whom you interact with the world by commanding him to perform various functions.  In the original game, as mentioned above, this is done by a simple text parser, but since this isn’t really a possibility for the Famicom, that version instead has a large menu of all of the actions you can ask Yasu to perform.  The actions include: move, ask, investigate someone, show item, look for someone, call out, arrest, investigate thing, evidence, hit, take, theorize, dial phone, and close case.  Some of these are more important than others.  For example, I don’t remember “look for someone” ever being successful over the course of the whole game, whereas investigate someone is important for learning new bits of information and investigate thing is important for gathering new clues.  Theorize is another command that’s never technically necessary during the game but it can serve to give the player some hints.

Possibly the most frustrating facet of the game is the fact that selecting investigate thing and then selecting magnifying glass brings up a magnifying glass cursor that you use to actually select a point on the screen.  I would say this creates an irritating example of pixel-hunting but I can’t even really call it that because sometimes there isn’t even a pixel.  Sometimes when this needs to be done to find a new piece of evidence, you’re required to select a spot on the screen where there doesn’t appear to be anything at all.  Adding to this is the fact that it can be pretty specific where you actually need to search.  It might not be enough to search under a table, instead requiring you to search a pretty small region under the table.  I obviously wouldn’t mind this if there were any visual cue, but sometimes there just isn’t.  It isn’t a huge aspect of the game by any means, but whenever I did get stuck, it was almost always because I didn’t meticulously comb every inch of some screen.  To be fair, I believe every time this comes up is on one of the locations in or around the house where the victim was found dead, so it does make sense that I should have been much more thorough with the magnifying glass there of all places.

The structure of the game is actually surprisingly open.  You can more or less go anywhere in the game and find clues there or interact with the characters at any time.  However, you still have to proceed with the main story linearly.  Oftentimes, the aspect of the game that controls the flow of the story is events that occur in the police station at different times.  For example, one of the suspects is one of Yamakawa’s clients that has been reported as missing and you can learn about him and start to follow that lead pretty early on.  However, until you eliminate suspect of the first act of the game you can’t trigger the flag for the event in the police station that gives you the clue to find out where the missing client is and eliminate him.  This structure is something I experimented with for a while during my playthroughs of the game.  Even though you can almost completely set up the chain of events that ultimately leads to solving the case from the very beginning of the game, you end up missing one tiny little thing that lets you completely follow through with that lead until you proceed as normal.

Another big new aspect of the Famicom version of the game, as mentioned above, is the large Wizardry-style first-person maze located underneath the Yamakawa mansion.  Like a lot of the game, you can access this pretty early on, but the most important part of it is still inaccessible, again via an event at the police station, until you complete the rest of the story.  It’s a fairly complex maze and can be pretty easy to get lost in.  This is mostly because of the sudden transition as you move square to square.  It looks pretty natural when you’re just moving forward, but when doing turns, especially 180-degree turns, you can get pretty disoriented.  To be fair, the same can be said of Wizardry, but it can be pretty hard to get used to after playing something like Phantasy Star where the animation for moving through the maze is much smoother and feels more intuitive.  The maze does contain a Wizardry-style message (that turns out to be graffiti) saying that you were surprised by a monster, which is pretty amusing.

The true culprit, once you finally do cross off all the other suspects and find out who it is, is actually a pretty neat twist.  It was considered so shocking at the time that it pretty quickly became a meme, even appearing as a gag in the manga, Rozen Maiden.  It also served as the namesake for a character in another well-respected mystery visual novel, which I won’t reveal the name of, lest I spoil both of them.  Unfortunately for me, I did go into the game already knowing the identity of the culprit, having been spoiled on it ages before ever even intending to play the game just due to how much of a cultural phenomenon it is, but it’s still a good story, with well thought out character motivations, and the lead-up to that revelation is cool nonetheless.

As mentioned above the graphics pretty much just consist of simple illustrations of the current scene of the story, with minor additions for some scenes, such as the ability for multiple characters to show up in the interview room in the police station.  In the original PC versions, these graphics were drawn using lines and fills, looking somewhat like MS Paint drawings that took quite a while to be drawn on the screen, probably due to having to read from the disk.  The graphics of the Famicom version are still crude (owing to not using any mapper chips to extend the Famicom’s graphical capabilities, which did make the game extremely cheap to produce), but less so, and loaded much faster.  And I can certainly forgive crude graphics for such an early title.  Probably the more unfortunate fact is that the game contains zero music.  The only sound effects in the game at all are the sirens at the beginning and end, the noise that plays for the text scrolling, and a few sound effects in the maze.  It makes the whole thing feel pretty lonely, which may or may not be intentional.  The mobile phone versions did add music though, so there is that if you can find it.

Overall, apart from being an extremely important game it actually is a fun game with a good story.  I’d definitely recommend it, especially if you’ve managed to avoid spoilers.  It’s pretty short and can be beaten in a couple of hours at most, which is good since there’s no save function of any kind.  Up next is a game that I’ve already finished just the other day, Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom, so the write-up should be rolling out pretty shortly.

Links:

The original version (seen above) was programmed for the Russian Electronika 60 terminal computer by Pajitnov while working at the Computer Center in the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow in order to test the capabilities of the new hardware, which he often did by creating computer games.  It was an extremely simple version graphically owing to the fact that the Electronika 60 had no graphical capabilities.  Everything was represented in text, with the tetrominoes being represented by square brackets.

The gameplay was based on pentomino puzzles, though using tetrominoes instead for the sake of simplicity, with the pieces falling into the playfield to be arranged by the player.  Originally it seems that at some point the game would’ve been just about trying to arrange the shapes and that’s it, similarly to the pentomino puzzles.  But Pajitnov soon realized that the shapes filled the screen very quickly and elected to have rows disappear, thus forming the central gameplay tenet of Tetris: the objective is to make horizontal lines for as long as possible before the shapes fill up the screen.

It’s an extremely simple, yet deceptively fun and addictive formula.  This goes without saying.  So much so that it lends its name to a well known psychological phenomenon: the Tetris effect, in which performing a task for a long time can lead to seeing its patterns everywhere, even when just closing one’s eyes.  It’s probably something you’ve experienced before, if not from actually playing Tetris, then from doing a new job or activity for the first time.

In addition to being famous for how successful and well-loved a game it is, Tetris is also infamous for its complex legal history.  This is mostly due to shady practices of early companies involved but also somewhat complicated by the major stakeholder in the property for over a decade being the Soviet Union itself.  In fact, for a long time, because intellectual property rights did not really exist in Soviet Russia, Pajitnov received very little money for his tremendously successful invention.

But because the history of the game is such a clusterfuck and there are so many versions of it, I figured a good way to talk about this would be to play several of them.

AcademySoft version (MS-DOS)

The original was ported to MS-DOS based IBM PC compatible computers sometime in 1986 by Pajitnov’s friend and colleague: Vadim Gerasimov, a much younger man (only 16 at the time!) who was well known within the Academy for being a computer genius.  It was “published” by AcademySoft, the licensing arm of the Academy of Sciences at which they worked, in 1986.  This first port was the first version I actually played and is also the version that really started to set things on fire.  It was shared, originally by the programmers themselves within the offices, on disks and BBSes until it had spread all over Moscow and then Russia and eventually all over Europe.

Despite this, it’s a very hard version to go back to after having played any other version.  It has graphics, sure, but the pieces consist of simple solid colors with no division between the individual blocks.  The title screen logo is rendered similarly, flashing between the different colors.  And everything else other than that is still rendered in text.

Of course, since it’s Tetris this wouldn’t be a huge deal if the controls weren’t so unresponsive.  The controls are mapped to the number pad, which is fine (unless you have a tenkeyless keyboard, I guess), but it has what seems to be an input queue.  If you hold down a directional key to try and move a piece around very quickly, it will queue up all of those inputs and continue executing them after you let go of the key.  Sometimes they’ll continue even after the piece lands, so that the next piece comes out flying to the left or right without you pressing anything.

It’s possible this is a quirk of the specific version’s delayed auto shift programming or of the DOSbox emulation (though I didn’t have this problem with the next port I played on DOS).  In any case, this can be mitigated by moving the pieces through individual keypresses, which is a better practice anyway.  Although, it still felt like some of my inputs got lost even while doing that.

Other nuances of this version are that it has a piece rotation system that resembles the later Nintendo one (and is presumably identical to the Electronika 60′s roatation system).  This means no wall kick if you rotate a piece next to a wall and no lock delay.  It has hard drops only, though it is apparently possible to maneuver pieces during the drop.  All of this and the controls combine to make it a pretty difficult version to play.  It also requires you to press the 1 key in order to show the next piece, which is just strange.  Maybe a performance related thing for computers back then?  I have no idea.

The game also has no music and the only sound effects are little beeps when you clear a line or get game over.  Suffice to say I didn’t play this version very long.  I just played enough to fill the high score table (another new feature of this version over the original) with some pretty lousy scores, some of which were me making an early mistake and just giving up anyway.

Mirrorsoft/Spectrum HoloByte version (MS-DOS)

Here is where things get interesting and legally sketchy.  Sometime after the AcademySoft version set Europe on fire, Robert Stein of Andromeda Software encountered the game at the SZKI Institute of Computer Science in Budapest, Hungary along with some clones for the Apple II and Commodore 64 created by some of the students.  After playing the game, he was immediately interested and was referred by them to the Soviet Academy of Sciences from where they had originally received the game.

When Stein wired a message to them displaying his interest, it was originally Pajitnov that was tasked with negotiating.  However, due to Pajitnov having difficulty responding to the telex and the general Soviet disinterest in actually marketing something, Stein did not receive a reply for weeks.  However, unbeknownst to the Soviets, Stein had already sold the rights to a British software company known as Mirrorsoft headed by Robert Maxwell along with its American affiliate, Spectrum HoloByte.

Despite not yet being successful with negotiating the rights from the Academy, Stein assured Mirrorsoft that the rights to the computer versions of the game were in their hands.  Mirrorsoft developed and (along with Spectrum HoloByte) published a version that was widely ported throughout 1987 and 1988 to a variety of the many computers used in the United Kingdom such as the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, and of course the MS-DOS based IBM PC compatible, which is again the version I played.

Despite being British-developed, this version oozes Russian flair, due to Mirrorsoft wanting to play up the foreign, second-world mystique.  The graphics on the title screen are almost entirely red.  After a certain point the title itself changes to being the phrase “Play Tetris!” written in Russian with Cyrillic characters (pictured above).  The title screen graphic itself depicts St. Basil’s Cathedral, prominently displaying its iconic onion domes.  It also depicts a Cessna plane flying across (pulling a “Play Tetris!” banner), referencing an infamous incident in which a West German pilot, Mathias Rust, illegally landed a Cessna in the middle of Red Square, right in front of the Kremlin.

The difficulty selection screen depicts a map of the Soviet Union, again red.  And within the game itself, as the difficulty level rises, the background image cycles through various Russian scenes, such as Yuri Gagarin’s (and humanity’s) first space flight, many of which look very cool.  The background for level 5 in particular, which shows a Russian space station (pictured below), looks great.  Even the packaging was red and depicted Soviet imagery, with the Cyrillic C constituting the title’s last character resembling a hammer and sickle.  It all very much works in the game’s favor and gives it a lot of identity.

The controls of this game are also a lot better.  You can use the arrow keys (with the Enter key to rotate) or the number pad.  The controls are much more responsive without the strange input queue issue the previous one had.  It has a similar rotation system to the previous version (though very slightly different) and once again only has hard drops.  It still requires a press of the 1 key to display the next piece for whatever reason.  It also contains a height option which generates garbage blocks up to a certain height for you to deal with, similar to Game B in the later Nintendo version.  Overall it plays much better and has much better presentation.

The only shame is that it still lacks music and still only has minimal sound effects.  This is true of all of the Mirrorsoft and Spectrum HoloByte computer ports, with the sole exception being the Commodore 64 version.  The music is the only notable thing about that version, other than that it’s supposed to be a pretty bad version.  But man, what a song it is.  Clocking in at an insane near 26 minute length, it’s a very interesting song.  It just doesn’t sound very Tetris-y.  More like a weird psychedelic journey into the mind.  But maybe I’m just biased toward the more well-known Russian tunes.  Either way, C64 composers are from another dimension, I swear.

After the runaway success of this game in computer stores across both Europe and the United States, the positive press reached the Academy.  The Soviets were very upset that the game had been marketed without their approval.  Elektronorgtechnica (or Elorg for short), a newly created Soviet ministry handling the import and export of computer products, took over the negotiations from Pajitnov.  Eventually, they did settle on granting Stein the rights to computer versions of Tetris.  Despite initially being published on bogus rights, the Mirrorsoft and Spectrum Holobyte versions were now tenuously legal.

Bullet-Proof Software version (NES)

However, the situation didn’t remain legally sound for long.  Though he had only received rights to the computer versions, Stein, of course, wanted a cut of the arcade, console, and handheld pie.  He sent a memo back to Mirrorsoft (falsely or perhaps mistakenly) stating that he had secured the console rights and later assuring them that rights to the arcade versions would be coming shortly.  In fact, despite this, Elorg was proving to be a very tough negotiator, maintaining that Stein already owed them a lot of money for the computer versions he sold without their permission.

Again, while Stein was struggling with Elorg, Mirrorsoft sold off the console and arcade rights to Atari.  Atari began work on an arcade version for market in the United States, as well as an infamous NES port of this version which will be discussed later.  Meanwhile, they sold the rights to a version for Japanese arcade markets to Sega, a port of which will also be discussed later.  A third player also entered the fray: Henk Rogers, the president of Bullet-Proof Software, who marketed games in Japan.

Having seen one of the computer versions at a trade show, Rogers approached Spectrum HoloByte to attempt to purchase the rights for Japanese computers and arcades.  After some struggling between the multiple companies, Rogers was granted the rights to the Japanese computer versions but was informed that the Japanese arcade rights had already been sub-licensed to Sega and was told if he wanted to purchase other Japanese rights, he would have to sub-license them from Atari.

After meeting with them he was able to secure rights to market the game in Japan for the Famicom, while Atari still intended to sell their version in the United States.  The game was now split among at least five different companies across multiple markets for multiple platforms.  Bullet-Proof Software developed and published its Famicom version (the next version I played) in Japan on December 22, 1988 along with versions for a number of different Japanese PCs including the NEC PC-88 and PC-98, the Sharp X1 and X68000, and the Fujitsu FM-7.  With their computer, console, and (through Sega) arcade markets filled, the Tetris craze could now thoroughly sweep Japan.

This version is the first console version I played and is pretty much where things start to get very good.  Visually, it also retains the Russian feel that the Mirrorsoft and Spectrum HoloByte computer versions had, but doesn’t present it quite as strongly.  Its title screen image, also of St. Basil’s Cathedral, is somehow less visually interesting despite having more than two colors and integrating the tetrominoes into the image (I guess implying that you’re building the cathedral in the gameplay?).  It also only has one background during the gameplay depicting a couple of onion domes.

One enormous leg up it has presentation-wise though is the fact that it has music and a wider variety of sound effects.  The title screen music marks the first appearance of the Russian folk song “Korobeiniki“ (often known as the Tetris theme) in a Tetris game.  The in-game music includes two other Russian folk songs, “Kalinka” (or Karinka as the in-game Engrish refers to it) and “Troika”, both of which are also featured in Atari’s version.  The third song featured is an original one, “Technotris”, which actually slaps pretty hard.  The only drawback is the games run pretty long in this version, so any of the songs can get old quickly.

The reason the games run longer in this version is that it is structured very differently from the marathon style of the other versions so far.  In addition to just being difficulty levels, the levels in this version are also literally that.  After clearing a set number of lines, the level completes and it is only then that you are awarded your score.  After the end-of-level scoring display disappears, so too do all the pieces remaining on the field, giving you a fresh slate to work with, at least for the first round of levels.  It also features a lives system, allowing you fail multiple times before a game over.  This ends up making the game feel too easy, at least at first.

Another thing about the game that is immediately noticeable is that drop (of which there is again hard drop only) is mapped to the A button, while rotate is mapped to down.  For me at least, this feels completely backward, but you do get used to it.  Some further nuances of the game are that it used its own rotation system, but this system served as a the predecessor for the Standard Rotation System that would eventually be put in place as The Tetris Company much later tried to standardize the look and feel of the numerous Tetris ports.

In fact, this game is a common lineage for many later Tetris versions, owing to the fact that Bullet-Proof Software was, in the end, one of the few companies to hold on to publishing rights.  Henk Rogers eventually helped Pajitnov found The Tetris Company, essentially making Bullet-Proof Software (later Blue Planet Software) comprise 50% of that company.

Sega version (Genesis)

As mentioned above, Sega received the rights to create a version for Japanese arcade markets from Atari.  This was after a Sega of America employee discovered one of the many versions of the game.  Although these were rights that Elorg had not given away originally, they would eventually be granted to Stein, causing the rights chain that went to this version to be retroactively legal.

Whatever the case, Sega’s arcade version did very well in Japan, releasing in December 1988.  As opposed to the Bullet-Proof Software version, it helped to popularize the marathon style of play instead of the level-based style.  Its Sega Rotation System and other rules became the prototype for many other different versions of Tetris, including the popular Tetris: The Grand Master series.

But specifically, I would like to talk about the version I played, the ill-fated Genesis/Mega Drive port, developed by Sanritsu and intended to have been released sometime in 1989.  Though a prototype exists (and at one point a copy of it was put on auction for a million dollars, due to its extreme rarity), it was shelved due to the copyright issues that would eventually come to a head over the legality of the console versions of the game.  Although, strangely, this version did get a release in the form of Sega’s Mega-Tech hardware based on the Genesis/Mega Drive due to it technically being an arcade game.

Though it is a very faithful recreation of the arcade game, presentation-wise it seems kind of boring.  The title screen consists of a logo written into bricks set over a bland blue-green landscape that seems to have had tetris pieces pulled out of it.  Like the Mirrorsoft/Spectrum HoloByte versions, the background of the playfield changes as you play (though in this version it’s based on getting tetrises rather than the level rising).  This game, rather than Russian scenes, depicts scenes from prehistory and human history: from an ocean landscape, to dinosaurs, to the Ice Age, to Stonehenge, to more modern buildings and cities, and finally to a futuristic city.

Aside from looking kind of boring, with their look resembling digitized photographs (even though they obiously aren’t, considering the futuristic city and tripod-posture tyrannosaurus), the images are mostly blocked by the playfield.  I didn’t even know the fourth background had a dinosaur until I paused the game.  The arcade version does have a monkey that animates throughout play so that’s one advantage it has, I guess.

The song that you hear for most of the play, “Tetremix”, is also somewhat boring.  It’s a very low-tempo, bassy song (though as you advance through the levels it increases in tempo until it reaches kind of a mid-tempo but that’s it really).  There is a second song that plays when you get dangerously close to the top, along with title screen and ranking entry songs, but none of them are really worth writing home about.

But despite all this, the gameplay in this version does hold up.  It’s the first version I played that has both hard and soft drops.  As mentioned before, it has a precursor to the rotation system seen in the Tetris: The Grand Master series although, strangely, the ceiling also blocks rotation, which took some getting used to.  The scoring system complements the marathon gameplay very well, giving bigger score bonuses the higher a piece lands and therefore encouraging the player to take bigger risks beyond just trying to get a clean and at least four high row stack for a tetris.

The biggest addition to this version, however, are the special item blocks that can be toggled on or off before each game.  If turned on, every ten pieces, a flashing tetronimo will come down.  Depending on which shape it is, it can activate different effects upon being used to clear at least one line.  These effects can include a larger score bonus, raising or lowering the level, or clearing three other nearby lines.

Overall, I didn’t care for this version very much.  I certainly don’t think it’s worth the million dollars.  But I do appreciate what it’s gameplay brought to the table as well as its status as the progenitor of the Tetris: The Grand Master series.  On a more positive note, this version actually did eventually receive a home console port in Japan as part of the Sega Ages 2500 Series Vol. 28: Tetris Collection for the PS2.  This compilation included the original arcade game along with two Tetris-like sequels made by Sega: Flash Point and Bloxeed.  It also included a new version called Tetris: New Century.

Nintendo version (NES)

Here is one of the versions that everybody knows, along with the Game Boy version.  And these versions only materialized after the rights tensions came to a head in the form of a vicious legal battle between Nintendo and Atari over the console rights to the game.  It began after Nintendo was finalizing their design for the Game Boy and decided they wanted to have Tetris as a pack-in game.  They enlisted the help of Henk Rogers, who they had a positive business relationship with, and who recognized the potential of the Game Boy prototype of the game they showed him.

Rogers began to attempt correspondence with Stein to let him know they should try to secure handheld rights as soon as possible but essentially got the cold shoulder from him.  Stein was in fact still struggling to make deals with the Soviets on his end.  Eventually, Rogers lost his patience and flew to Moscow to secure the rights himself.  Coincidentally and unbeknownst to one another, both Stein and Robert Maxwell’s son, Kevin Maxwell, also ended up flying to Moscow, frustrated with the way the negotiations were going.

Rogers was the first to meet with Elorg at the Academy.  He managed to quickly make a good impression on them, especially Pajitnov himself who he ended up befriending.  With this, he was able to easily secure the handheld rights to the game and signed a contract after only two meetings.  In a cheerful mood after his successful deal, he decided to show them a copy of his Famicom Tetris that he had brought along.  The mood of the room immediately fell off a cliff as the Soviets asked what the game was.  After Rogers explained what it was, they angrily declared they had never sold the console rights.

As Rogers tried to frantically explain how he secured that deal and from whom, he realized that the rights he bought were a sham.  Meanwhile, the Soviets also found out from him that Atari was marketing and sub-licensing arcade rights.  Rights which they also never gave away.  Rogers, wanting to make things right and stay within his benefactors good graces to maintain the deal he just made, agreed to pay them back-royalties for all of the Famicom carts that had sold, including a large advance.  Appeasing them, Rogers realized this was also his chance to secure the console rights for Nintendo.  While Mirrorsoft and Atari were both big contenders, Nintendo was the proverbial 800-pound-gorilla in the room at the time for video games and had very deep pockets.

Sometime later, Stein met with Elorg.  Rather than discussing the arcade and handheld rights, they immediately make him sign an addendum to his computer rights contract.  Focusing on the parts of the addendum concerned with the late fees he owed, he did not pay much mind to the seemingly innocuous line that very clearly defined what a computer is.  This was part of the plan to prevent him from arguing that he did own the console rights as part of the computer rights.  After he eventually decided to sign it, Elorg gave him the arcade rights (which he still had to pay a very large amount of money for), but not the handheld rights.

When Maxwell ended up meeting the Elorg representatives, they simply presented him with the Famicom cart, asking what it was.  Maxwell, not knowing that his own company had sold the console rights to Tetris, maintained that it must be a pirated copy.  This gave Elorg further ground upon which to claim that Mirrorsoft, and by extension Atari, had no right to the console versions of Tetris.  Impressively, within these three meetings, the Soviets had regained complete control of the situation.

As Elorg worked with Rogers as well as officials from Nintendo of America, including Howard Lincoln and Minoru Arakawa, on the case, Lincoln sent a cease-and-desist to Atari, ordering them to stop production of their NES game.  The tensions escalated to the point that the senior Maxwell of Mirrorsoft’s parent company started throwing his weight around, even using his significant ties to convince the President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, to put pressure on Elorg.

Eventually, once the Nintendo v. Atari trial actually started, it all came down to whether or not the NES and Famicom could be considered computers.  Atari argued that it was, pointing to its extension ports, networking capabilities, and even the fact that Famicom is short for “Family Computer.”  Nintendo’s argument was more straightforward.  The Academy only ever intended to sell the rights to computer versions as explicitly defined in the contract.  The court eventually ruled in favor of Nintendo, who were then able to legally make Game Boy and NES versions of the game.

With that extremely long preamble out of the way, Nintendo was able to make a Game Boy version of Tetris in June of 1989, which became a pack-in.  They followed up with the NES version (which is the version I played) which was developed and published by Nintendo in November of 1989.  With this, the Tetris craze was able to sweep the United States more thoroughly than ever before.  Because the Game Boy version led to sales of Game Boys and more Game Boy games, it was an incredible success for Nintendo.

While I still think the title screen for the Mirrorsoft/Spectrum HoloByte version has the cooler looking rendition of St. Basil’s Cathedral, this one looks pretty slick overall.  The logo and the border around the title screen look very good.  There aren’t any changing backgrounds in this version, which is a shame, but instead the pieces change colors as you advance through the levels which keeps things visually interesting.

Like the Bullet-Proof Software and Atari versions, this one has music with Russian folk flavor.  Music 1 is “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s ballet, The Nutcracker.  Music 2 is an original composition, but still retains the Russian sound.  Music 3 is another original, but is also recognizable as the song that played when Nintendo put you on hold at the time.  Of these, I typically go with Music 1 most often.  Also, the victory music for Game B is the “Toreador Song” from Georges Bizet‘s opera, Carmen.  Unfortunately, it does not contain “Korobeiniki“ like the Game Boy version does.

Gameplay-wise this version uses the Nintendo Rotation System and lacks a hard drop, but does use soft drop.  It also has a Game B which plays similarly to games using the height option from the Mirrorsoft/Spectrum HoloByte version.  It spawns garbage blocks up to a specified height and challenges you to clear a certain number of lines.  Depending on the height and difficulty you select, you get different victory screens, with the hardest ones showing several Nintendo characters.  Game A also has a victory screen if you get a high enough score, showing a rocket being launched.

With its solid gameplay and presentation, this ended up being the version that I played the longest.  I even ended up getting some halfway not terrible scores.  It also helped that the Retro Achievements site that I used actually had some cheevos for this game that did a good job of encouraging me to shoot for better scores.  The only real drawback to this version is it lacks the multiplayer modes seen in the Game Boy version, but these modes were added to the port of this version included in Tetris & Dr. Mario, so it’s not a total wash.  Overall, this is probably among the best of the early Tetris versions.

Tengen version (NES)

So, this is the version that got the short end of the stick.  Even more than the Sega Genesis version.  Even though this version did actually release (despite the cease-and-desist from Nintendo), after the lawsuit Atari was forced to take it off shelves pending the verdict which was ultimately a loss for them.  This led to hundreds of thousands of copies of the game that they produced but could not sell and were forced to leave to languish in a warehouse.  This was a huge financial loss for them.  It also led to the game being somewhat of a collector’s item, but the copies don’t sell for the extreme amounts the Genesis version does, since there were a lot of copies sold prior to the lawsuit.

Atari’s arcade port was released sometime in 1988 and this port was developed by Atari and published by Tengen in May of 1989.  Tengen was Atari’s console games division and even beyond Tetris was infamous for the legal trouble they were often in.  Prior to the Tetris lawsuit, they landed in hot water for bypassing Nintendo’s lock-out chip on the NES in order to publish unlicensed games, since Nintendo only gave publishers license to create three games a year.

And y’know, it’s really a shame that this game got recalled because it’s actually pretty damn good.  The title screen features the usual cathedral, in a large and colorful rendering with fireworks being set off.  It also features a nice looking border.  While it doesn’t go quite as ham as the computer versions, there is one piece of faux-Cyrillic in the logo with the backwards R.  The graphics on the playfield look pretty basic though and I don’t really care for the way the pieces look.

This version includes one more song than either the Bullet-Proof Software or Nintendo versions.  Two of them are original compositions, “Loginska” and “Bradinsky”, named after one of the programmers and the composer respectively.  Both songs still manage to retain some Russian flavor.  The other two songs are “Kalinka” (still in Engrish in-game despite being done by a western company) and “Troika” which both appeared in the Bullet-Proof Software version.  Of these, my favorite is probably “Kalinka.”  Also included is the traditional Russian song “Katyusha,“ which plays during the scoring screen in between levels.

The gameplay uses its own Atari Rotation System with soft drop only.  Like the Bullet-Proof Software version, the gameplay is level-based, though you still accumulate points during the actual levels, unlike that version.  After clearing a set number of lines, a score screen comes up which calculates bonuses depending on how many singles, doubles, and so on you scored.  Also, unlike the Bullet-Proof Software version, the pieces are not cleared from the screen after completing a level.  There is also a handicap option which is really just the height option seen in the other versions.  The difference here is that the blocks spawned with the handicap are more tightly packed, making it easier to clear them right away.  Unfortunately, it seems as though some of the later level challenges such as randomly spawning garbage blocks present in the Atari arcade version were cut.

The really nice thing in this version however is the multiplayer modes.  Had these modes not been cut, these would’ve been a deciding factor in whether or not to purchase this over the Nintendo version.  It features competitive multiplayer against another player or against the computer.  Also, strangely, it features cooperative play with another player or the computer.  The co-op mode features a very large playfield with two pieces falling at once, one controlled by each player.  It’s a strange mode, but it’s so interesting that I’m glad they included it.  It seems like something that can create a lot of friction between people trying to play it as they accidentally fuck each other over.

Overall, this is actually a great version.  A lot of people at the time of its rocky release and recall argued that it was the better version.  While I do love the Nintendo version, it’s really a tough call.  If it had the little challenges present in the later levels of the arcade version and the multiplayer modes, I would definitely agree.

In the end, Nintendo’s versions of the game definitely came out on top legally.  The Tengen versions were recalled, being a big hit against Atari.  Mirrorsoft collapsed during the legal struggle, although Spectrum HoloByte managed to survive and make a couple of Tetris sequels for computers along with Pajitnov.  Robert Stein made relatively little off the game, but probably could’ve made more had the companies he sub-licensed to (legally or not) paid him royalties.

The big winner other than Nintendo was Henk Rogers of Bullet-Proof Software.  His company managed to continue making Tetris sequels and variants.  Eventually, after the rights to the original game reverted from the Soviet Union to Pajitnov, he and Rogers worked together to form The Tetris Company.  Together they continued the Tetris legal battles, working to remove many of the other versions of the game that had cropped up illegally and also worked to standardize the formula for legally licensed versions.

So, that’s a very brief history of Tetris’s tumultuous early releases, along with my thoughts on some of those versions.  A lot of the material in this, my longest entry yet, is sourced from David Sheff’s Game Over, a book on the business history of Nintendo, which includes a couple of chapters about Tetris.  It’s an extremely interesting story and I obviously couldn’t include the level of detail present in this book, so it’s definitely a recommended read.  Next time, I’ll be continuing my puzzle game gauntlet with some of the early Tetris sequels, starting with Welltris.  Until then, take it easy~

Image Sources:

Electronika 60 screenshot - Tetris Wiki

The game is the debut release of future Pokémon creator, Game Freak.  Prior to this entry into the video development industry, Game Freak was simply the name of Satoshi Tajiri and Ken Sugimori's self-published video game fanzine, which began running in March of 1983.  The game was designed by Tajiri and features art by Sugimori.  The American version, of course, takes the "angry eyebrows Kirby” approach and ditches the cute Sugimori art in favor of designs with more attitude (seen in the title screen above and on the American box art), which look just terrible.

The plot, especially in the American version, is pretty bare bones, as could be expected from an NES action game.  The plot, which can be read in the manual, is your standard rescue-the-princess kind of story.  The hero, Bon-Bon, must rescue Princess Candy after her dolls come to life, cast her into an eternal sleep, and cart her off to the titular Mendel Palace.  The Japanese version provides a bit more detail and whimsy.

In this version, the characters all live in a country of dolls.  The protagonist is named Carton (with the second player character being named Parton!) and the damsel is Jenny.  The plot to capture Jenny is orchestrated by Carton’s sorceress younger sister, the titular Quinty.  After Carton and Jenny fall in love, Quinty becomes jealous of the attention she is receiving and manages to convince her and Carton’s three older brothers to kidnap her, who comply with the hopes that Quinty will pick one of them as a favorite.  I don't think Quinty or the brothers are ever named in any of the American material.  Maybe Quinty's American name is Mendel?  I guess?  Whatever, I'll be using the Japanese names because I like them better anyway.

In any case, when the game starts you off on a map screen, allowing you to play through the eight dollhouses surrounding the central palace in any order.  Upon entering any of the dollhouses, the objective is to defeat all of the dolls inside by flipping tiles in order to slide them into the walls.  In addition to regular tiles, there are also others, such as star tiles, which act as coins and give you an extra life when you collect 100; shockwave tiles, which flip all other tiles in all four cardinal directions; and the bane of my fucking existence, the portal tiles, which spawn in another enemy whenever they appear.

Each of the initial eight dollhouses feature a unique type of doll, posing various levels of challenge.  The easiest ones are the walkmen, which just pursue the player and, in later stages, split into two smaller versions if they are slid without them hitting a wall.  They aren't even really good at pursuing the player, since they cannot walk into you if you stop moving.  The others are much more challenging, such as the jumpers which cannot be slid while they are mid-jump, the mimics which move when you move and flip tiles at the same time you do, or the swimmers which quickly swim across the room and flip tiles behind them as they go. Each dollhouse contains ten rooms, the tenth of which usually contains a boss encounter (save for the walkmen dollhouse).

The bosses of the initial eight dollhouses are either extremely powered up versions of the dolls in the dollhouse or a fight with one of the brothers (though in the American release, some of the boss fights against the brothers are replaced with fights against Quinty).  The brothers simply hop over you and can typically be baited into hopping next to a wall where you can easily defeat them.  Quinty will use her magic to turn you into a doll, which allows her to slide you into walls to defeat you.  But if she turns you into a powerful type of doll such as a sumo wrestler, who can flip rows of tiles, you can turn this against her.

The central palace (Mendel Palace in the North American version) contains all eight types of dolls and ends with a fight with one of the brothers followed by a cutscene of Quinty whisking you away to her true palace in the clouds.  The palace in sky contains a ninth type of doll and ends with one last brother fight followed by a final battle against Quinty.  As mentioned before, in the Japanese version you only fight the brothers in the dollhouses, so in this version, this is the only time you fight her.

So, as you can see the game has a lot of different elements that it plays with.  Some of them seem pretty simple at first, but it quickly ratchets up the difficulty in each area with different tile configurations for each room.  A lot of the most difficult rooms feature large amounts of portal tiles, which spawn in new enemies as you defeat them, forcing you to think of ways to quickly get rid of them.  Other rooms will simply box you in with large amounts of block tiles which block your path or limit your options with large amounts of bolted tiles which you cannot flip.

However, a lot of this difficulty is sidestepped by the fact that you have infinite continues.  This allowed me to hammer through the game pretty quickly.  But now that I've beaten it and figured out strategies for a lot of the tougher points by just bashing my head into them I can see myself minimizing the continues with practice.  The game also has a secret Extra Palace mode which can be accessed by holding Start + Select and then resetting your system and consists of a linear set of 100 new, more difficult levels.  If I ever come back to this game it will be to play the extra mode.

Graphically, all of the sprites and animations in the game are very cute, which of course goes with Sugimori's art very well and clashes pretty badly with the North American art.  Quinty in particular has a really cute design, so I felt kind of bad during the ending because she is just crying in the corner of the room while Carton and Jenny have their little moment.  The music by Junichi Masuda is very catchy and reminescent of his later work with the Pokémon series.  A friend of mine pointed out while I was streaming the game that the opening of the boss battle theme sounds like it could be the fanfare that plays during the transition into a wild Pokémon encounter.

So, even though I pretty much charged through this game continues blazing, I ended up enjoying it.  I liked the cute style and all of the twists it threw in to the relatively simple formula.  The game also has co-op multiplayer which might be another reason to revisit it, on top of the extra mode.  I should point out that another new thing I did while playing this game was used the Retro Achievements website via the RetroArch multi-system emulator, which I plan to do for other games in the future where possible.  Next time I'll be playing the original Fire Emblem by Intelligent Systems.  Until then, take it easy~