Tetris: Perfection Hidden in Plain Sight
Tetris is a video game that needs no introduction. It is one of the most-famous, best-selling, and most-ported video games ever created. Tetris was created by Alexey Pajitnov in 1985, and the game’s excellent design and near-instant popularity helped the game spread… first as freeware passed between computer programmers and operators in the Soviet Union, and then as a commercial computer and video game adapted to practically every electronic device imaginable all around the world. Today Tetris is as relevant as ever, both as an icon of game design, and as a worldwide phenomenon and franchise of games and toys.
I first remember hearing about Tetris when Nintendo announced the Game Boy was coming out in 1989. As a certified Super Mario super-fan, I was thrilled with the prospect of having a handheld version of Mario, and I began my campaign for my parents to buy me a Game Boy and the game I most wanted, Super Mario Land. Sony’s Walkman was a pop-culture icon at the time, and I was fascinated by the notion of having electronics that fit in my pocket and were able to play music or video games on the go. These products seemed so futuristic, and they promised to break us free from desks and electrical outlets to enjoy our media. It was an inspiring and intoxicating idea!
And while Tetris wasn’t the reason I wanted a Game Boy… Tetris came packed-in with the original Game Boy nonetheless here in the United States, and it helped set me on my journey as a game designer and computer programmer.
I’m not going to attempt to explain every in and out of how Tetris works – if you haven’t yet played the game then you owe it to yourself to try it out right now. You likely have a phone in your hand or your pocket that can download and play a free version of Tetris – not to mention the dozens of other versions of the game that can be played on computers, tablets, and game consoles.
The fundamental gameplay of Tetris is that you have to place an endless series of geometric shapes, falling one at a time from the sky, into a playfield. Playing Tetris is much like playing with building blocks in real life, except instead of placing a single block at a time, you are handling composite shapes, each made up of four blocks welded together into one of seven possible configurations. These shapes are called “tetrominoes”, and we’ll keep calling them “shapes” in this essay.
As the shapes fall they stack on top of each other, up until you slot the shapes together to complete an entire horizontal row of blocks – and then all completed rows are destroyed, and the remaining pieces fall down together to fill the space. The game is over when your playspace fills up and you can no longer place a piece without it overflowing the top of the screen. You get a score for each row of blocks you complete – and your final score is determined once you can’t place any more shapes!
Tetris’ gameplay is deceptively simple. In the tradition of games like Chess, Go, and Poker… this simplicity, mixed with practically endless variety and countless possible game sequences, is what makes it a timeless classic. As a curious game designer and educator, I’ve been driven to examine Tetris and contemplate and theorize why it works so amazingly well.
(For the sake of this essay I’m only considering the design of the classic version of Tetris that came out for Game Boy, Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), and PC / MS-DOS.)
It was a minor miracle that I got a Game Boy in 1989. All of my previous attempts to talk my parents into getting my siblings and me a Nintendo were met with absolute refusal. I can still hear both of my parents saying variations of “you can’t spend all day in front of the television” – which truth be told is exactly what I would have done had I had direct access to Mario, Zelda, and Metroid back then.
And it wasn’t because my folks were luddites. My dad was a computer enthusiast, and he’d borrowed computers from work and brought them home a couple times. In the mid-1980s he bought an IBM PCjr for the household, which in hindsight made me one of the luckiest kids in town. The PCjr was not a particularly popular gaming computer… and compared to the games available on the NES, its games were dog slow. But my dad’s other catch-phrase was “why buy a system that can only play games, when you can learn how to make games on a real computer?”
But at some point my family recognized that my Mario obsession wouldn’t be quelled solely by frequent visits to my neighbors’ houses to play on their Nintendos. So they relented and my Christmas gift that year was in fact the original Game Boy. They made me save my own money from running lemonade stands and doing yard work in the neighborhood to buy Super Mario Land, so on Christmas morning the one and only game we had to play on the Game Boy was Tetris.
I believe it’s easiest to think of games as consisting of basic building blocks – a collection of challenges and rewards governed by a set of rules. This is true for all games – everything from real-life sports like baseball to tabletop games like Clue and all the way up in complexity to video games like Minecraft. There are an endless number of possible games that can be designed – the selection of the challenges, rewards, and rules make for unique gameplay, and the specific combinations, compositions, and sequences of these elements can be mixed and remixed to make each game exciting, enthralling, and novel.
The absolutely most basic games are so simple – consisting of a tiny number of challenges, a handful of rules, and implicit rewards – that we would hardly consider them an actual “game”. Instead we call these game-like constructs “game mechanics”. Each “full game” is made up of multiple “game mechanics” – and if each game mechanic has fun “gameplay” and is an engaging activity on its own, then there’s a really good chance that the overall game that lets players engage in many mechanics will also be fun.
There is practically no limit to the number of possible game mechanics – it’s up to each game designer to select or invent the best mechanics for their game. There are many conventions for game mechanics, so much so that we talk about video games as belonging to genres – not genres based on their narrative themes or cinematic stylings, like film genres, but instead as typical collections of game mechanics that define each game genre.
Transcending typical game mechanics and genres are what I consider to be “foundational” game mechanics. I believe these mechanics define intrinsically fun activities, activities that you can recognize in many different well known games – not just video games, but the worlds of sports, playground games, tabletop games, word games, and more!
Tetris perfectly embodies four of these foundational game mechanics – simple, direct, challenging, rewarding, and ultimately fun activities.
I don’t remember how long I got to play Tetris for before my family members insisted that they each get a turn to try out the Game Boy. I was protective of my new toy, but I recognized that this was quite the exceptional situation, and that I had better play nice lest my folks change their mind and make the Game Boy go live on a nice farm somewhere. I don’t remember their immediate reactions, but I do remember that my dad and his sister both played Tetris a lot. I was certainly obsessed with Mario and my desire to make the pixelated plumber run, jump, and shoot his way through the Mushroom Kingdom. But my family, arguably a family of math nerds, became TOTALLY OBSESSED with Tetris.
When I would leave the house I’d invariably come home to find my dad or aunt playing Tetris. Or worse, I wouldn’t be able to find the Game Boy where I left it, because someone had been playing it in a different room of the house and had not returned it. Maybe this whole portable electronics thing was a bad idea after all? I remember being particularly frustrated one day when I came home and the fresh batteries I had put in a couple days before were already dead – all because my family had been playing Tetris all day while I wasn’t around.
As a game designer, I’m always asking myself why I’m enjoying the games I’m playing. The majority of games I’ve played and made in my life are games that take place in fictional universes, where you take on the role of a main character, play a part in the game’s story, and use the main character’s abilities to traverse the world and defeat their foes. On the surface Tetris seems like the absolute opposite to a game like Super Marios Bros. – but despite having zero fictional trappings, Tetris shares many of the same characteristics of Super Mario Bros, and features a foundational game mechanic that most Mario games lack.
But before we dive into the four foundational game mechanics that define Tetris, let’s talk about what Tetris is not. Compared to other hit video games, Tetris is elementary, simplistic, almost basic. Unlike Super Mario Bros, Tetris does not have characters, a fictional world, or a storyline. The artwork and graphics of Tetris are abstract, recognizable as blocks and shapes, but as little more. Tetris also does not have cutting edge graphics or leverage the latest in technological wizardry. And Tetris is a game that reveals almost all of the information to the player – as a perfect-information game. There is no additional game board or information “off screen”, there are no new levels or worlds to “travel to”. Everything you need to know to play Tetris is on the screen, and it even tells you which shape is coming next (although not the one after that).
And yet Tetris is one of the most immersive, engaging, and compelling video games ever made. It just might be the platonic ideal of game design – simple and abstract and universal and pure. How does Tetris achieve greatness with the most basic of components? It appeals to our core understandings of the world and engages us with four foundational game mechanics: movement, creation, destruction, and problem-solving.
I believe these four game mechanics to be foundational – I believe they are intrinsically fun to us as human beings for reasons that are likely wired into our genetics, our society, and our culture. Sometimes writing about them as individual activities feels overly simplistic – but just as the classification of nouns as “plants, animals, and things” is simplistic, often these generalizations and abstractions are useful to inspect and consider our world, our artform, and industry of game design. So without further ado, here are the four foundational game mechanics.
It’s fun to move around. It’s fun to run, skip, dance, jump, and swim. Countless activities in our lives include movement and physical activity. In Tetris, your sole interaction with the game is about moving and rotating the shape and placing it in its destination. Like in Super Mario Bros, you have direct control over the shape – you can move it to the left and to the right, you can rotate it 90-degrees clockwise and counter-clockwise. And just as you can make Mario run instead of walk, you can slam the Tetris shape down into its destination. While the shape does not have a face or personification, the current shape in Tetris is your avatar. And it’s fun to move them around. It’s just fun to press a button and immediately see something move on-screen – “I did that!”
Early in the game you are moving the pieces at a leisurely pace, able to take your time to think about where to put them, with plenty of room for exploration of the concepts and experimentation with your strategy. You even have time for an incorrect move or two. But as the game continues the speed with which the pieces fall increases, giving you less and less time to think – turning what looks like a puzzle game into a game of agility, reflexes, and precision-timing. While you’d almost never describe Tetris as an “action game”, playing the later levels of the game is as challenging and demanding as playing any e-sport video game – even though all you do is move a single piece around. It’s especially fun to move fast-moving things around on screen!
It’s fun to be creative and make things. Unlike most action games, Tetris lets the player modify their play space by taking an active role in its physical construction. As you drop each shape to the floor or on top of other previously-dropped shapes, the current shape freezes and becomes part of the permanent structure. And that is an intrinsically fun and rewarding activity. Look no further than Minecraft or Fortnite, action-adventure games that became wildly popular in large part because they also fostered this environmental creativity in their players.
It’s also fun to build things in a physically simulated environment. Sure, you can move shapes around on-screen in Powerpoint – and while that’s fun for some folks, it’s not nearly as fun as doing so when there are rules governing how and where and when you can place and stack the shapes. It’s also fun to build sand-castles, carefully stacking and balancing and shaping buckets full of sand on top of each other to create unique architectural expressions. When you are engaged in a creative act, you can step back and feel powerful and accomplished that you made something that didn’t exist before you came along.
It’s the challenges and rules of the video game Tetris that make it particularly satisfying to stack blocks up to the ceiling. Even if that means you’re making the game harder for yourself by filling up the playspace.
It’s fun to be destructive. Just as wielding the power of creation is a fun activity, it’s also fun to wield the opposite power – the power to destroy. What’s the most fun activity to do after you build a sand castle? Ruining it by kicking it down or pouring buckets of water overhead to melt it back into the beach. And even if ruining sand castles isn’t your personal favorite activity, if you grew up with siblings or cousins… then no doubt at some point one of you had the absolute time of their life ruining sand castles!
While Tetris does not let the player be directly destructive – you aren’t shooting guns or dropping bombs into the playspace, the ultimate goal of Tetris and the most satisfying moments in its gameplay are absolutely about being destructive. When you drop a shape into a gap in the playspace, completing one or more horizontal rows of blocks, all of those rows are destroyed. You earn points for this destruction, and you are further rewarded by having more room in your playspace for additional blocks.
No one is going to look at Tetris and describe it as a violent game. But the same fundamentals are at play in Tetris as in any action game. Dropping a slim Tetris shape into a narrow chasm and removing four rows at once can be as exhilarating as Luke Skywalker perfectly shooting a proton torpedo into a narrow exhaust duct to destroy the Death Star in Star Wars. The verbs we use to describe these activities are the same – navigating through a precarious environment, having perfect aim, and using precision timing all add up to an exciting and fun destructive moment!
It’s fun to feel smart and solve puzzles. It can be argued that all games can be boiled down to problem solving. Each challenge presented to you is a problem, and it has to be evaluated and overcome with one form of solution or another. But there are types of problems in games that you can’t solve only by moving things, creating things, or destroying things. Often we call these “puzzles” – challenges that force you to step back from raw reactive thinking and really use your brain to proceed.
Tetris is like an endless jigsaw puzzle – and while you’re engaging in movement, creation, and destruction all at the same time, the “right way” to play the game is to perfectly fit the shapes and blocks together without any gaps or whitespace between them — and solve the puzzle. While action games featuring Super Mario are light on puzzles, one of my other most-favorites is the Legend of Zelda series. These games are rife with puzzles set in between exploration and sword-fighting. Zelda’s puzzles each have a correct answer and often ask the player to think about their character’s tools and abilities in a different way than usual.
Solving a puzzle is a particularly satisfying activity, and that’s true whether it’s a jigsaw puzzle, the daily Wordle challenge, or a frustratingly obscure sequence of actions to reveal a hidden door in The Legend of Zelda. Tetris is constantly asking the player to solve the puzzle of the game board, and each time you slot a shape into a perfect spot it’s fun and satisfying. And when you solve the puzzle to complete an entire row, it’s even more satisfying!
To call Tetris satisfying is a gross understatement. My dad, who had always been inclined towards sports, games, math, and puzzles, simply wouldn’t stop playing Tetris when it first came out. Things were getting desperate – I wanted to play Super Mario Land and was getting tired of having to wrestle it away from my family! So I did the unthinkable – I started hiding my Game Boy when I was done playing with it. I would stuff it under my bed or behind books on a bookshelf or in between underpants in a drawer. I was pretty nervous about this act of defiance… surely my dad would come looking for the Game Boy and I’d have to own up to my deception. But somehow that day never came…
Tetris is a nearly perfect video game. The game has you engage in four fundamentally fun and rewarding activities in equal parts: movement, creation, destruction, and problem-solving. Not only that, but the game has a built-in escalation to it! Things begin at a calm and leisurely pace, with the shapes falling at a slow constant speed, letting you focus on one thing at a time. You have time to look at the blocks in the play space, evaluate your current shape, decide where you’d like to place it, and then take time to position the shape… and after that rotate it to fit just right.
As you progress through the levels of Tetris, the shapes fall faster… forcing you to react faster and faster – to the point where you are interpreting the game board, making decisions, and acting on those decisions all at once. This escalation sneaks up on you, increasing the overall challenge of the game over-time, while also increasing the pace of the game, the rhythm of your button presses, and the overall excitement and drama of the game. Despite not having characters or a storyline, it’s undeniable that watching top-skilled Tetris players is a thrilling and enjoyable experience.
Tetris has been in a the news a bunch lately – first with a motion picture, dramatically telling the story of its creation and commercialization, and more recently with players beating Tetris to what was previously thought to be an impossible “ending”, and then going even further and finding way to make Tetris loop in gameplay. This first loop was accomplished by a human player in 2024, causing a rebirth where the game resets to level zero, making the shapes fall slowly again, all while keeping the player’s score. And these record-breaking events have happened on live video streams – with hundreds of people watching these accomplishments
Along with this escalation, Tetris also incorporates two very important gameplay elements: variety and surprises. After you place each shape, the game randomly selects another shape for you to place in the queue. Every time you play the game, the sequence of shapes is different, leading to unpredictable and surprising gameplay. It’s fun to plan for your current shape and the revealed next shape, building accordingly. And then you get to guess which shapes may come after that, and hope-for and anticipate their eventual arrival to complete your rows! This unpredictability is naturally rewarding – look no further than almost every board and card game ever made.
Tetris combines and composes these four fundamental game mechanics in a fun and unique way, making it one of the most replayable singleplayer video games ever made.
A few days after I’d begun hiding my Game Boy… or maybe a few weeks… my Dad asked me to come talk with him. I would never know what was on the agenda with him… was I going to receive an impromptu math lesson, be scolded for rough-housing with my siblings, or maybe he had finally caught wise to the fact that I was the reason he’d been denied the ability to play Tetris. I don’t recall exactly how the conversation went, but he did show me something I’d never forget. There on the screen of the PCjr. was Tetris… in color! Where did my dad find a version of Tetris for the PCjr?!?
Well, it turned out to be slightly more complicated than that. When my dad had gone looking for my Game Boy one day for his Tetris fix and come up empty handed, he did what any computer hobbyist would do: he cracked open the BASIC programming language manuals, and programmed a version of Tetris for himself. He had played enough hours of Tetris that he remembered how it worked, and then put in the time to program a version that he could play on the computer. It was so exciting! Now we had two ways to play Tetris in our household.
But sitting here today, writing this essay, I’m more humbled than anything else. I’m humbled because I would still be impressed today by anyone who programmed their own version of Tetris – not to mention doing so without the help of the Internet or example code from anyone else. And I’m also humbled because it brings into focus just how unique of a family I had growing up. My dad wasn’t a professional game developer, and wasn’t even a professional computer programmer. He was just a guy who loved math and games and puzzles, and he thought making his own Tetris would be a fun puzzle to solve.
Clearly this influence left its mark on me. Growing up in a house where people made their own video games… especially in the late-1980s and early-1990s… exposed me to ideas, concepts, and possibilities that most other kids my age didn’t have. And while I’ve told this story a couple times to friends and colleagues in a “you ever hear about the crazy time my dad made Tetris?” kind of way – today I share the story with awe, wonder, and admiration. While my dad was just making games for fun, I’ve since been able to make a career out of making games, and I hope to continue passing on the lessons and inspiration that I took from him as I was growing up.
Even though I’ve never programmed my own version of Tetris, I’ve really enjoyed analyzing it and thinking about what makes Tetris so incredibly fun while being so incredibly simple. Tetris is a timeless masterpiece, and I imagine in another forty years there will be hundreds more versions of Tetris, and countless more games and designers taking inspiration from its lessons. I hope you’ve enjoyed thinking about what makes Tetris tick with me, and if you ever come across a version of Tetris programmed in BASIC for the PCjr, I’m still looking for my dad’s version of the game. I guess it’s only fitting that after I hid my Game Boy from him so many years ago, that the floppy disks he saved the game on are now lost or hidden from me.
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