13 - Tetris [DE] (Game Boy)https://vgcollect.com/item/277791Hardware: Game Boy Color / Game Boy Advance (Screen Mod) / SNES+Super Game Boy
Highscore: 127.531Oh mighty, what is NOT to say about this game!?
For many console/handheld gamers my age, the first experience with video gaming came along with an iteration of
Tetris in any imagineable shape or form. Many of us have fond memories connected to it and starting this review I'm a little overwhelmed with what to mention first of what makes this game the undisputed milestone of video game history it truely is. I decided to start off with my personal Tetris-story:
To ears a bit younger than mine (I'm born 1988), it might sound weird, but before being confronted with the Nintendo Game Boy in the early 1990s, my infant mind didn't know what video games, consoles or handhelds were. Our mother blessed us with the purchase of an Game Boy Tetris Bundle along with a classic series version of
Warioland, and this actually was my very first contact with any form of video game. The iconic Type-A music was the first piece of game music that ever graced my ears. After a while, the Game Boy +
Tetris became furniture inside our bathroom, suddenly increasing the cases of spontaneous digestive problems within our Family
Since those golden days of my childhood in the early 90s, I've played/re-played this title a bazillion times on almost every original hardware imagineable during my lifetime of now 37 years. I could sum up nostalgia regarding this game endlessly, so I'd rather get into the real informative section:
The history of
Tetris reportedly began in spring 1984 with a guy named Alexei Paschitnow. While working for Dorodnitsyn-Computer-Centre of the Soviet Academy of Science in Moscow, he came up with the idea of computing an electronic version of the puzzle-game 'Pentomino' that he knew from his childhood. This forefather of what whould become one of the most influential videogames of all time was thought out by Solomon W. Golomb in 1954 and functioned by puzzling with shapes assembled out of 5 squares - so called 'Pentaminos'. Realizing those Shapes and reconstructing this game in it's original way wasn't technically possible back under the iron curtain and constant threat of nuclear winter, Paschitnow simplified the puzzle's shapes down to ones composed out of 4 squares, he then called 'Tetraminos', which ultimately lead to the game's name
Tetris - if not to say
Тетрис (a combination of Tetramino and Tennis). The very first version he came up with this way lacked sound and color, but is said to have already had captivated the rest of the programmers team at Dorotnitsyn. The first colored version was ported to an IBM-PC in summer 1985 by Wadim Gerassimow.
I won't bother you with the confusing story about how this gem made it's way out of the midst of the USSR over to Japan/North America and Europe, but let me say this: this story reads itself like a cold war espionage thriller and would make a awesome infotaining payTV series. The version of Tetris I tend to play was released by Nintendo in Germany along with the Game Boy in 1990 and is said to be the original inventor Paschitnow's favourite version.
Graphically, of course the GB-version already was way more defined than it's first iteration and introduced the game with a beautifully (in 8-bit ways) drawn picture of the Kremlin and it's own well known and loved ending sequences showing either a small or medium rocket, or a space shuttle lifting off, if either 100000, 150000 or
200000 points are scored.
I always loved to create my own
colour-palettes on Super Game Boy, especially for this game. Here's my personal Super Game Boy colour palette code list for
Tetris:
0812-7328-4349 (Original Game Boy Screen)
1920-6419-7320 (Soviet Red)
2423-0624-2179 (Sibirian Snow)
1393-0627-8201 (Tundra Blue)
3541-3322-6292 (Magical Moscow)
I'd be glad to see someone using these
And now, my favourite part: music. The Soundtrack of
Tetris for Game Boy was entirely composed and/or ported to the system by Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka, who was highly influenced by classical music in doing so, especially old russian folklore music. Most common example is the iconic Music A, which essentially is a shorter version of the russian poem/song 'Korobeiniki' originating in 1861. Music B is mostly Tanaka's own composition, also highly influenced by russian folklore. And my personal favourite, Music C, turned out to be an interpretation of a menuette of Johann Sebastian Bach's 'French Suite No. 3 in B-minor, BMV 814' (ca. 1722-1725). The last known classical influence of
Tetris' musical score is known to be the victory-fanfare, which is a part of the musical piece 'Trepak' out of Pyotr I. Tschaikowski's 'The Nutcracker' from 1892. Every other song is said to be composed entirely by Tanaka himself.
With that in mind and the fact that the game's mechanics themselves are based on a very old game, Game Boy's
Tetris seems to have been a classic experience all around even way before it's commercial release!
I think I don't really need to mention
Tetris' genuine mix of simplicity, addictiveness and rising challenge. Everyone knows of the points that make this game shine out through the decades. But I hope my review gave some of you guys a bit further information which perhaps was formerly unknown to you.
I considered this game as finished because I kept on failing to beat my latest highscore. If you're into this, try beating it and let me know.
With this dinosaur of a game behind me, I'll continue to finish my PS1-games before they rot again
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quite a lot anti war holocaustic stuff going down which kinda captivates me as player up to a point were I catch myself really starting to hate the fictive enemies 
... there're not many games capable of doing this.
