As a child, I had a device that only played “Tetris”. It was a blue oval with two semicircles jutting off it on either side of the screen. If there was a performance my family wanted to go to, and I had to come along, I would have “Tetris” to play. This was after my family ensured the sound was off. 

As someone in university with little time to learn new games or video games, I appreciate something simple like “Tetris”. While juggling classes and other responsibilities, I don’t want to learn a new game. 

“Tetris”, released in 1984, is one of the games that I come back to time and time again. I would introduce every little detail of the game, but, odds are, you have heard of it or played it at some point in your life. 

One of the things that makes “Tetris” so fun to play is its simple controls. Unlike some 3D-based games, where the right stick oversees the camera and the left stick controls your character, “Tetris” is simple to learn and hard to master. 

Along with simple gameplay, new features are introduced with each new game. These features, in large part, don’t mess with the core gameplay of stacking blocks. “Tetris” on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) didn’t have a way to save a block. In other words, in the current version a block is saved and can be retrieved later. The piece falling down the screen during  the NES age was the piece you were stuck with. Saving a block changed “Tetris”, though  it remained the same at its core.

This speaks to another perk of playing “Tetris”. Even when it innovates, like with “Tetris 99”, a battle royale game on the Nintendo Switch, it has always been about block placement. The game, again, remains the same at its core.  

 Along with always having a new version to play, even the NES version of the block-placing game is advancing. In April of last year, a way to press directional buttons faster was introduced. In later levels of “Tetris”, pieces fly across the screen. If you can’t move blocks fast enough, they will land in the wrong spot. This new technique was introduced in an article by Kotaku entitled, “NES Tetris Players Call It ‘Rolling,’ And They’re Setting New World Records.” 

“Rolling”, as the article calls it, has players hover one finger over the directional button the player wants to press and the other hand “roll” underneath the controller. This allows for faster input speed to play at an even higher level. 

“Tetris” is a game where players have broken new ground a few years shy of its four-decade anniversary, and it’s these new discoveries that continue to keep me intrigued with it.