Tetris is an essential play for everyone.
This is stipulated here, and pretty much everywhere else too: Tetris is a game everyone must play.
That’s not surprising, or at least it shouldn’t be to anyone currently breathing air. This puzzle game — in which different shapes fall out of the sky and one must arrange them so that you can fill in a line to clear out more room for still more falling blocks — is widely considered the best puzzle game in existence, if not the best video game … period.
Again, so stipulated.
What’s kind of fun about Tetris is that its roots account for some of its pervasiveness. This game has been ported an astounding 65 times and been purchased an even more astounding 202 million times. This fact, that there are dozens of versions of this game and it really doesn’t matter which version you play (unless it’s the Genesis version; that version sucks), is unique in this industry.
Also unique is its backstory, which involved a Russian programmer, the U.S.S.R. government, several gaming companies, and — for some reason — Hungary.
It’s one of the most popular games of all time. And yet, would it have been so popular if its licensing rights hadn’t become so bizarrely entangled?
Possibly not.
It got ported and ported and ported again, because no one knew enough about who owned the thing to be scared enough not to pirate the thing.
And thusly, Tetris spread like a disease.
Tetris
Genre: Puzzle
Released: 1987
Platform: PC (and everything else)
EGM’s No. 1 game of all time