Tetris (Atari Video Game)

''Tetris'' (styled ''TETЯIS'') is a puzzle video game developed by Atari Games and originally released for arcades in 1988. It is based on Alexey Pajitnov's ''Tetris'', and has the same gameplay as the computer editions. Players must stack differently shaped falling blocks to form and eliminate horizontal lines from the playing field. It has several difficulty levels and two-player simultaneous play.

In 1989, Atari Games released a port of its arcade version for the Nintendo Entertainment System, under its Tengen brand, though not licensed by Nintendo. Issues arose with the publishing rights for ''Tetris'', and after much legal wrangling, Nintendo gained the exclusive rights to publish console versions, leaving Atari with only the rights to arcade versions. As a result, the Tengen game was at retail for only four weeks, with fewer than 100,000 copies sold, until Atari was legally required to recall and destroy any remaining inventory of its NES version.

Nintendo produced its own version of ''Tetris'' for the NES and a version for the handheld Game Boy. Both versions were commercially successful and Nintendo held the ''Tetris'' license for many years. The Tengen release has since become a collector's item due to scarcity. Various publications have since described Tengen's ''Tetris'' as superior in some ways to Nintendo's official NES release, especially because of its two-player simultaneous mode.

Development and history

In 1987, Soviet Academy of Sciences researcher Alexey Pajitnov (who invented the original game in 1984-1985) alongside Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov developed a two-player version of ''Tetris''. Andromeda Software executive Robert Stein approached Pajitnov with an offer to distribute ''Tetris'' worldwide, and secured the rights to license the game. He in turn sub-licensed the rights to Mirrorsoft for the European market and Spectrum HoloByte for the North American market. After seeing the game run on an Atari ST, programmer Ed Logg petitioned Atari Games to license it for an arcade version, and approached Stein. With the rights secured, Atari Games produced an arcade version, and under its Tengen subsidiary began to remake it for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in June 1988. It was released in May 1989.

Mirrorsoft later sub-licensed the rights to Henk Rogers of Bullet-Proof Software to distribute ''Tetris'' in Japan. Around then, Bullet-Proof Software gave Nintendo a proposal of developing ''Tetris'' for the Game Boy, and Rogers traveled to Moscow to secure permission to distribute ''Tetris'' for the Game Boy. However, because Stein had secured the rights from Pajitnov directly and not from the Soviet authorities, the Ministry of Software and Hardware Export stated that the console rights to ''Tetris'' remained unlicensed, and that Atari Games had only an arcade license. In April 1989, Tengen, which had previously filed an antitrust suit against Nintendo, sued Nintendo again claiming rights to distribute ''Tetris'' on the NES, and Nintendo counter-sued citing infringement of trademark. In June 1989, one month after the release of Tengen's ''Tetris'', U.S. District Court Judge Fern Smith issued an injunction barring Tengen from further distributing the game, and further ordered all existing copies destroyed. As a result, 268,000 ''Tetris'' cartridges were recalled and destroyed after only four weeks at retail.

The Tengen cover has an airbrush painting by well known illustrator Marc Ericksen featuring St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square, Moscow, with a falling stone concept at its base that mirrors the gameplay. Atari used the same art when advertising the new release, adding a fireworks motif.

Ed Logg said that the Tengen version of ''Tetris'' was built from scratch, using no source code or assets from the original. After presenting the game at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Tengen president Randy Broweleit requested improvements. He wanted the black-and-white pieces to be colorized, and Logg complied prior to the next CES. When asked which version of ''Tetris'' he liked the most, Logg stated the Nintendo version for the NES "wasn't tuned right" due to a lack of logarithmic speed adjustment, yielding overly steep increases in difficulty.

Reception

By the time of the court order demanding Tengen cease distribution of the game and destroy all remaining copies, roughly 100,000 copies of the game had been sold, and it has since become a collector's item. It has been called superior to Nintendo's own release for the NES, with 1UP.com noting its termination as a loss for players, citing its gameplay and two-player mode, but in another article, it noted that without the hype surrounding the game during the lawsuit, Tengen's ''Tetris'' would have likely been forgotten. GamesRadar stated similar sentiments, praising Tengen's version and noting that the Game Boy version was also superior to Nintendo's licensed NES version. IGN placed the Tengen version at #48 on its list of the Top 100 NES games, noting its superiority to the official Nintendo version, which is not on the list.

References

External links

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{{Tetris

1988 video games
Atari arcade games
Nintendo Entertainment System games
Tetris games
North America-exclusive video games
Tengen (company) games
Unauthorized video games
Video games scored by Brad Fuller
Video games developed in the United States
Multiplayer and single-player video games