The story of Tetris is pretty well known by now. There have been books and documentaries – foremost among them a wonderful BBC doc called From Russia with Love – and there have been movies and YouTube histories and all that beautiful jazz. And yet what I adore most about Tetris Forever, a new playable, interactive documentary from a team that has already shown it’s very, very good at making playable, interactive documentaries, is kind of perverse. What I adore most are the moments that Tetris Forever steps away from the familiar story, the familiar falling shapes, the familiar talking heads and talking points, and makes Tetris feel really weird again.
Tetris Forever reviewPublisher: Digital EclipseDeveloper: Digital EclipsePlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out on 12th November on PC (Steam), Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS4, PS5, and Nintendo Switch.
Case in point: Hillary Clinton, first lady of the US on a plane in 1993 playing Tetris on the Game Boy. It would be a stellar picture in any case – a private moment extracted from a very public life, the mixture of deep concentration and relative frivolity, the neatly buttoned coat and just the hint of a smile of satisfaction forming. But knowing it’s not just the Game Boy, but Tetris on the Game Boy somehow makes it all the weirder. Worlds colliding. You, Tetris? Here? Really?
Another case in point: Tetris was the first video game to have been played in space. 1993 again – a big year for Tetris, it would seem. Nintendo’s Howard Lincoln gives a Game Boy and a copy of Tetris to cosmonaut Aleksandr Serebrov, and he dutifully plays it in orbit. Doesn’t that feel bizarre but also just right? Tetris out there, ringing around the music of the spheres? The essential, inevitable video game in an environment defined in such stark, timeless fashion by Gagarin and Kubrick?
I didn’t know that about Tetris and space, although if someone had asked me, hey, what do you reckon the first game played in space was, I would have said: Tetris, for sure. But that’s the joy of what Digital Eclipse does. Tetris Forever is the latest in the team’s Gold Master series, in which video game history is treated as video game history should be treated. Attention is lavished on it. Lots of it is interactive and genuinely playable. And even before all that, the curation is exquisite. Previously we’ve been given Karateka and the birth of the cinematic impulse in games. We’ve been given Jeff Minter, a genuine creative genius. And now Tetris, the forever game. The game so deliriously simple and compulsive it still feels like it was discovered as much as invented. That’s not to take anything away from its creator, Alexey Pajitnov, just as revelling in the laws of motion doesn’t take anything away from Newton.