This review is written from a “Tetris is a perfect game” perspective. I figured I would apologize in advance for dashing any hopes of a unique take there. Tetris has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, starting with tiny, likely illegal bootleg mini-consoles used as rewards at a local fair and ending with a mild addiction to the mobile version during my last year at university.
Its history, unique to the point of translating into a celebrated script with 2023’s Tetris movie, made its way to pop culture in bits and pieces. The famous copyright fiasco is one of the first pieces of game-related trivia a layman would learn playing a board game. As such, it is one of the few games where its origins have been retold perhaps one too many times already, creating a brand new challenge for the ever-inspiring Digital Eclipse team in their third Gold Master Series title Tetris Forever, serving as a follow-up to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story which released earlier this year and remains my favorite experience of 2024.
In comparison, Tetris Forever feels less personal to me as a player. Its story is more cohesive, cleaner, crazier, and grander, presented on an established and proven formula of the Gold Master Series, yet it is not nearly as timely as the tale of a passionate, independent developer and columnist struggling against the increasing corporate influence on gaming. It also lacks timelessness due to an enormous chunk of time being presented through bullet points: the final chapter, detailing the past two and a half decades of Tetris, feels like a collection of unimpactful trivia, lacking a single playable version of the game to break up the pace until the very end.
Despite that, this interactive documentary finds its emotional throughline in the friendship of two vastly different, yet wonderfully eccentric owners of the brand: the math-loving creator of the game Alexey Pajitnov who opens the documentary with tales of his puzzle-loving childhood in the Soviet Union and the extroverted, bold businessman and developer Henk Rogers, who follows up with an exhilarating story of moving between countries and opportunity-chasing, ultimately taking the reigns as the game’s primary narrator when the more famous parts of Tetris’ legacy are being tackled.
The contrast and throughline of both their stories are heartwarming to watch unfold. Their humanity and humor (Pajitnov’s “Play Tetris, my friends” is going to be stuck in my head for a while) shining through as if they are telling this story for the first time—all, of course, broken up with you playing rounds of Tetris and, if you are anything like me, losing all sense of time. The magic of the Gold Master Series lies in the sudden bursts of palpability. Launching the game feels like reaching into the screen, and becoming an active participant in the story just by enjoying an entertaining game.
Perhaps my favorite part of Tetris Forever is the moment when you get to play Bullet-Proof Software’s (developer helmed by Henk Rogers, later renamed into Blue Planet Software and eventually formed into what we now know as The Tetris Company) Go simulator for the Famicom. The preamble to that is a video package of him explaining his relationship with Nintendo and its, at the time, president Hiroshi Yamauchi, and later transitions perfectly into his first trip to Moscow and how Go once again played a key factor in the story.
Igo: Kyū Roban Taikyoku is certifiably not a Tetris game, but its inclusion greatly enriches the experience. I may have zero tactical knowledge of Go, but interacting with what is described as a marvel of technology at the time of its release gets the point across better than any description ever could. This is exactly the kind of feeling that makes the final leg of Tetris Forever feel empty in comparison.
I do not begrudge the omissions of games here. What you get is still very entertaining, but anyone should come in knowing this is never the complete vision of any one point of the game’s history, and supplemental playing comes highly recommended. Tetris’ rise to fame is inherently tied to copyright issues, so it feels almost fitting that its documentary seemingly struggled with the same problem. Nevertheless, it does undeniably sting a little to see what looks like an awesome rendition of Tetris on the arcade only to be faced with six separate, though remarkably similar versions of Bombliss instead. Not to say Bombliss is bad by any means, I played each version for at least an hour. Same for all three versions of Hatris!
Making up for it all are the two most unique Tetris variants in the collection: Tetris Battle Gaiden and Digital Eclipse’s very own Tetris Time Warp. The former is a hilariously unbalanced but highly addicting battle-style game with multiple colorful characters to choose from. Like the majority of games in the collection, it is presented in its original form, meaning it and its instruction manual are entirely in Japanese. The “How To Play” section in the menu is there to translate the menus and and explain the abilities of each character to any English speaker, though for each game like this, it would be worth adding a notice as to where one can find that.
The latter is a unique twist befitting Tetris Forever’s status as a documentary. Though you can play it as a regular, modern style of Tetris with, compared to other games on the collection at least, tight controls through the Modern Marathon mode or experience a bit of old-school with the 1989 Marathon mode, the main attraction here is the Time Warp mechanic present in Time Warp Score Attack and 3-min. Time Attack. Certain blocks will contain warps, and clearing any part of them will send you into the original, Electronika version of Tetris, one of the handhelds, or Bombliss. Completing objectives inside them will grant you a great deal of extra points.
It has its share of quirks, the obvious one being the screen transition between different periods. At higher levels, you will not be able to see the screen before your first block drops. Another is that the skill ceiling is relatively lower due to a somewhat low cap on speed levels at 15. Even I, who got my butt kicked in every other version of the game present in the collection, got much further than I should have. The music also tends to very noticeably skip and cut out at higher speeds, giving priority to the sound effects and creating a rather unpleasant cacophony.
Tetris Forever as a whole is the first title in the Gold Master Series to get a disclaimer from me. A “great, but” if you will. Perhaps Tetris is just too massive not to have certain parts of its history feel bullet-pointy. Maybe it has too rich a history to have all the most important and greatest hits contained in one place. Even with this understanding, it is unmistakably a compromised product of a few too many rejections. Somewhere along the way, I got hit with a wave of disappointment that a company that has proven that they can capture the passion for these titles unlike anyone else cannot gain the trust of some people at the top.
With that, I cannot help but wonder whether this format befits titles as well-documented as Tetris. As much as I enjoyed it, I cannot say whether the compromises made here would not cause harm to the overall understanding of history. Regulations placed on commercial products may change, but their intrusiveness remains as unwavering as the status of Tetris itself. Personally, I would love for Digital Eclipse to slightly scale their efforts back in the future, working with creators they can cover more comprehensively. I am also looking forward to their upcoming Power Rangers game to see whether they can complete a spotless 2024 series of releases. Tetris Forever might not be a benchmark title for interactive documentaries, but it still props them up as one of the industry’s most consistent top developers with a goal you cannot help but cheer for.
Mateusz played Tetris Forever on PC with a review code.