So how was your holiday? I am doing fine. Goodbye and have a pleasant new year!

Ah… damnit, I guess I can’t skip another week. Besides I actually found some cool stuff for you today.
Retro Remakes recently held a competition; you’ve probably seen a few of the games already. As with every event, I’ve made a list of the ones that I really enjoy. I tried. I *really* tried to narrow it down to 5. I got down to 7. Sure there are a lot of mediocre entries, but the ones that are solid are undeniable… making them impossible to ignore.

Carnivac’s Demo I’m a little worried about this entry. The maker of the game has never finished a project before and there’s a good chance he won’t. Even if it’s just a demo, it’s on the list for a damn good reason. It’s got awesome graphics and sound that are a throwback to the Commodore 64 (Carnivac, like everyone else on my list, did an excellent job making this an authentic experience.) It’s a simple Nukem run-n-gun knockoff, but it’s got a lot of charm and great production values. Let’s all hope Carnivac keeps his hat in the ring and sees this out to the end.

Kung Fu 2 I love Irem. For every Deadly Towers, they grant us a Metal Storm. But that’s a topic for another day. One of their beloved classics is the arcadey and repetitive Kung Fu for the NES. This remake is a pretty cheesy update and it works. I’m especially fond of the Hadouken. It feels like a Super NES game, lame synth voices intact. It sports some pretty frustrating enemy patterns. A heads-up to the masochists: this game will make your fingers explode.

Blast Passage This is a pretty quirky entry. It’s Gauntlet + Bomberman. I’ll admit I didn’t care for it at first. The controls are slow (like Bomberman) which feels a little strange for a fast-paced Gauntlet setting. But the multiplayer sold me. You know me, I have a serious soft spot for one-screen multiplayer goodness. And by the way, there aren’t any surprises in this one. Picture Bomberman and Gauntlet together. Yeah, it’s exactly what you expect. Now is it just me? Every time I see a Java game worth my time, I sense that something is wrong within the universe. Moving on.

Tetroid Now we’re getting to the tasty bits of this contest. Imagine if Samus’ arsenal was made up entirely of tetrads? Yeah I’m a Tetris geek, so how could I pass on this? You should also give this one a shot. You can stack the pieces to reach new areas and clear lines to get access to new power-ups. It’s rough around the edges and kinda slow, but the idea is rock-solid crazy. I especially love the intro music. Metroid and Tetris is an unexpected yummy combination!

Snakoban Dash There are a lot of mash-ups for the competition, some work and some do not. This game is notable in particular. For starters, the gameplay doesn’t feel contrived. As cool as Tetroid is, it’s pretty ridiculous. Snakoban really feels like it’s own game and not just some random knock-off. It’s a cohesive experience and a pretty nifty throwback to the old DOS days. The EGA colors and sound are very well-done and the puzzles will twist your head. If you love puzzle games, hit up the download.

Staroid “What’s so special about this one?” You see, I give each entry about 5 minutes to impress me. Most of them fail this simple litmus test. I don’t know what compelled me, but I couldn’t quit this game. Yes it really feels like an old C64 game. Yes I love to jump and shoot. But it also seemed kinda boring. But I just kept playing it. Eventually I realized that the power-ups mattered. Then the map started to make sense. Honestly, figuring out the gameplay was half the fun. I dunno why, but I get a La-Mulana vibe from this game. Weird huh?

Devil Ronin This game wins. It got me from the start and it had me until the end. The presentation is an adorable old-school IBM that has amazing Japanese overtones. Out of all the games I played, this was the only one that sold it to me. If you showed this to me and didn’t tell me where it came from, I would believe in a second that it was 20+ years old. And I’d curse myself for not discovering it as a young boy. Don’t you dare skip this game.

The contest had some other decent games that are worthy of a look. I know I didn’t Spare a Thought for the Little Guy and I turned the lights off Lightmare, but they’re still worth mentioning… if only for the puns. Kiwi’s Tale, Ultimate Bruce Lee, the list goes on and on.

You know you don’t have anything to do until New Years. Check out the whole list… and don’t forget to donate! This contest deserves the cash.

Wow, this is getting up late. In my defense, I was playing video games.

Alright, I’m not an idiot. I realize that my blog is a personal one, meaning few if any actually read it. And if I spend more time writing these posts, I have to spend less time making games. I still plan on collecting my more interesting posts into articles, so it’s not like I’m abandoning this place completely. With that in mind, I’m gonna cut it down to updating on Mondays only. I like to say a lot, all at once. These little daily drabbles just don’t cut it. I also can’t be all ‘game pundity’ and do my projects at the same time. Some people were born to be journalists and analysts. Some were born to criticize. Others were born to create. I would like to join up with the latter.

But enough about me, let’s get on with the subject of the day. It’s time to turn our heads to TIG Source as one would turn to mecca.

Waaaaay back in the day, in the middle ages of Europe, there was a particular practice. Professionals and scholars would each write their own Commonplace Book. If you were a doctor, it would be a collection of notes describing herbs and treatments. Historians would keep notes related to their own discoveries. In short, anybody who was somebody had a Commonplace Book. This practice continues to this very day, in the form of blogging. So let’s talk about one particular ‘blog’ that TIG Source had in mind. In particular, it was a notebook that became very popular after the death of it’s originator. The man’s name was HP Lovecraft. Maybe you’ve heard of him. If you haven’t, then you should… probably keep that to yourself.

Okay fine, I’ll explain. Lovecraft had a lot of little inspirations. They were pretty similar in nature; he always wanted to strike a particular chord. Each paragraph in his Commonplace Book contains a sense of dread and uneasiness that hints at ending in crumbled hysteria. So, as you can imagine, his notebook is a jumbled mess of horrific visuals.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Lovecraft in games. Foregoing the obligatory mention of Eternal Darkness, there was also a competition in 2007 to create text adventures based on his ideas. So this is already well-trodden soil. But the TIG Source community has just proved that the well is far from dry.
They have managed to pull the spotlight towards them once again, reminding everybody why they are the best at what they do. It took a lot of effort from everyone there, but they created a great tribute to a man’s twisted ideas.

The most merciful thing in the world… is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

To be honest, I expected a lot of text adventures. I was surprised that there were few, and none had the clever dread of Poizoned Mind (from a previous compo.) Instead, there are a lot of platformers and other odd takes.

You know what? It works, damnit. Here are my personal five favourites!

8-Sound This is a very…strange shooter. There were a few shooters in the competition, but this one had the best mood. The others either had invisible enemies (I am SO not a fan of that) or didn’t really seem to fit in with the Lovecraft theme. The controls are a bit tricky, but once you get the hang of it you’ll be stylin’.

Dooror This game was pretty silly, but still managed to worry my sanity. You play a butler’s assistant, going around shutting doors and making sure “the Master” has a great party for his guests. There are several mentions of strange going-ons and it all reeks of a Lovecraft mystery. When all is said and done, it’s just a puzzle game that involves turning on lights and shutting doors. OR IS IT?

Insomnia Okay, now we get to the heavy hitters, starting with Insomnia. This game is evocative, creepy, and intriguing. Don’t skip the intro text, because it is a great mood-setter. Honestly, I almost wish this was a real book instead of a game. Or at least, I wish there was more to this story. Seriously, it’s a great premise and I can only hope one day we’ll see more. Oh yeah, the game. Well, hehe… it’s pretty good too!

Eversion This game was surprisingly complete. Most of the time, I expect compo games to be short or unfulfilling due to time constraints. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. At first, I wasn’t sure what was gonna happen. A platformer based on Lovecraft? Hey, isn’t this music from cheerful Cocoron? Hey, aren’t these graphics kinda too bright and cute? Why am I collecting gems? Oh man. Are you in for a surprise. This game is a true success on every level, especially if you get the real ending. As much as I hated the final level… I gotta say it was worth it. Wow. Kudos guys, you did an awesome job here.

Verge Next to Eversion and Insomnia, this game stands tall as a great piece of work. The concept of bouncing between life and death (sometimes literally), great controls, and whimsical graphics that mask the underlying Lovecraftian theme…. Again, I’m speechless. Wow. There weren’t many entries to this competition, but this is some of the best work I’ve seen from the TIG Source events to date. I still can’t believe it’s GM….

There were plenty of other entries that definitely evoked a great Lovecraft mood. For example, The Lake was interesting and some of the text adventures definitely struck that horror chord. Unfortunately they were all really short and… well, I didn’t feel there was enough meat on their bones to vote for ‘em. There were also a few entries that I thought were strong (such as From Primordial Egg and Clatter of Keys), but got blown out of the water by the competition.

But hey! I’m just one guy! I only get one vote! Your job is to get the hell over to the TIGS forum and join in the fun! Come, put on your indie hat! It’ll take you a few hours to get through all the 30+ entries, and it is very worth it.

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You know, there IS another event going on. They’re currently reviewing the entries to the Retro Remakes competition. I’ll get to that next week, but let me just say this: Metroid + Tetris taste very good together.

Can this fake licensing get any more confusing? You betcha. With all the attention Tetris was attracting, it didn’t take long for a new buyer to enter the scene: The Big N. Nintendo, impressed by the phenomenon, wanted Tetris for the Gameboy. They contacted Henk Rogers of Bulletproof for help with licensing and development. An alliance was formed. Rogers called up Stein, deliberately avoiding Atari. After all, a handheld wasn’t a console, right? But it was too much for Mirrorsoft already; Stein refused to even talk to Rogers. Perhaps Stein was worried about creating another legal mess. What could be done? Henk Rogers refused to give up. He decided to fly to Moscow and talk to the original owners.

Robert Stein, sensing that Rogers was about to blow his scheme, also flew to Moscow for damage control. It was at this point that Robert Maxwell, owner of Mirrorsoft, became suspicious of Robert Stein’s activities and sent his son Kevin to keep an eye on this licensing fiasco.

Henk Rogers was warmly greeted by Belikov, the new president of ELORG. Henk explained Nintendo’s interest. They struck a deal. To demonstrate how Bulletproof would use the license, Rogers showed off his Famicom version of Tetris. You know, that version that was licensed to them by Tengen (Atari) that was licensed by Stein that was licensed by…NOBODY? Belikov’s eyes probably popped right out. ELORG was furious. Henk Rogers realized that Stein had built a house of cards with his lies. Rogers, hoping to settle all hurt feelings (towards himself at least) offered to pay royalties for all the copies Bulletproof had sold.

ELORG went from pissy to happy in no time flat. After all this time, they were finally getting some money. Mirrorsoft hadn’t given them a single cheque even after all this time. Rogers (backed by NintendO), willing to pay up so quickly, made Stein look even worse.

In return, Rogers wanted exclusive handheld and console rights for Nintendo. ELORG agreed, but wanted to wait and get a bid for console rights. There was still a huge mess to sort out with Stein and Mirrorsoft.

First up was Robert Stein. It was all behind closed doors, so I can’t tell you how it was managed. I don’t know how Stein avoided an execution. Instead, ELORG only forced Stein to revise his previous PC-only contract to be legally airtight and completely explicit. They also passed a warning: Stein would be watched closely from now on.

ELORG then called in Kevin Maxwell and demanded to know what was going on. They waved a copy of Tengen Tetris in his face, Mirrorsoft’s name on the cover, and asked for an explanation. Maxwell was surprised to learn Stein lied about having console rights. Mirrorsoft had no idea that Stein had lied to them all this time. Mirrorsoft didn’t even know that Stein had sold the rights twice to both Atari and Bulletproof! Mirrorsoft was caught with it’s pants down. Maxwell pleaded for his company to have a chance to bid on the console rights.

It didn’t matter. This was 1988. Nintendo had more money than God. They offered so much money to ELORG that every other contender backed off. Atari was told to pull Tengen Tetris off the shelves. Atari glared at Mirrorsoft. Mirrorsoft’s Robert Maxwell couldn’t believe it and wouldn’t let it go. He even politicized the situation, going as far as getting re-assurance from Gorbachev that ‘the little Japanese company’ would be dealt with. Whatever. The truth came out to everyone. Stein was exposed. The awsuit formed by Atari against Nintendo went nowhere for years. Maxwell died under suspicious circumstances and his Mirrorsoft media empire shortly unraveled afterwards.

The moral of this story? Robert Stein is a jerk. And yet, he made $250,000 off his double-dealing ways while Pajitnov didn’t see a single dime because of communism. How fair is that?

Well don’t worry, there’s a happy ending. Alexey Pajitnov and Henk Rogers later formed the Tetris Company which has worked with Nintendo several times. They’re in charge of the international standards, they get paid for the use of Tetris, and Pajitnov has been making cool puzzle games since (my personal favourite is still Tetrisphere.)

I think this little story proves the power of Tetris. Stein jumped into his scheme, never imagining that Tetris would achieve such tremendous success. It was the huge media spotlight on such an amazing game that ultimately proved to be his undoing. But Tetris doesn’t end here. I’ll see you next week.

Did you know? Tetris is a combination of Tetra and Tennis. Pajitnov eventually made a 3D top-down sequel called Welltris. I tried it. It wasn’t much fun.

It didn’t take long for Tetris to escape the confines of Alexey’s workplace. Within a year, it was out of the country. Before it left Hungary it had already been ported to several different machines, including the Apple IIE and the Commodore 64. It was about this time that someone got the idea to license and sell the game. That’s when everything went to hell.

Seriously, I’ve got a headache just trying to sort out this mess. This is what happens when Communism meets Capitalism. Where do I begin? Well, let’s start with Robert Stein from the UK (I’m leaving out his Andromeda for the sake of my sanity.) Stein realized that Tetris was a real winning ticket and so went out of his way to get the licensing rights from Pajitnov directly. But, like an idiot, before he even signs any rights to Tetris, he sells the license to Mirrorsoft (you SNES Trekkies know them better as Spectrum HoloByte.) That’s right. Stein sold rights to a game that he didn’t yet own. Stein then flew to Moscow with a contract in hand, all ready to do business with Pajitnov. It was there he was polity informed that Pajitnov didn’t even own Tetris. The government treated him with obstinance; they didn’t even know what Tetris was. Infuriated that Russia ignored him, Stein pretended to the world that Hungarian programmers were the real inventors of Tetris and acted like he had bought the rights from them.

So now we have Stein pretending to have a license for Tetris. And we have Mirrorsoft thinking Stein gave them a legit go-ahead from Pajitnov directly, when in fact the Russian government legally had the rights the entire time. Mirrorsoft made their product. It didn’t take long for PC geeks to catch on to this great puzzle game. PC magazines heralded Tetris as the greatest puzzle game ever made. All the media attention eventually reached Russia and it didn’t take long for the government to realize that they had been screwed by Stein. Russia formed a company nicknamed “ELORG”; it’s sole purpose was to hold the legal rights for Tetris. ELORG went after Stein for his ’stealing.’ They spent months bickering with eachother. Eventually, somehow, it was settled. Stein and Mirrorsoft owed them money; in return they could keep making Tetris… but only for the PC.

So far so good, right?

You’d think that would be the end of it. Stein was finally authorized and joined with Mirrorsoft to legally distribute Tetris PC. But Stein, being a vicious bastard, wouldn’t quit. For starters, he realized there was way more money in arcades and consoles then there was in PCs. So Stein pretended that he had the console rights, even after being expressly forbidden personally by Alexinko (the first president of ELORG.) If that wasn’t bad enough, Stein then sold the rights to TWO different companies: Bulletproof and Atari. Atari was pretty pissed off when they found out about Bulletproof. They thought they were getting exclusive rights, and being the bigger company of the two, they got their way. Bulletproof was forced to buy the rights AGAIN, this time from Atari. Atari warned that the small fish could only operate Tetris in Japan. Henk Rogers, operator of Bulletproof, was not amused.

Robert Stein was getting away with murder.

After pretending he got rights from Hungary, I’m surprised ELORG was willing to cut him slack. And now look how he betrayed them. You don’t sell exclusive rights twice! And he didn’t even have console rights to begin with! Mirrorsoft, Atari, Bulletproof… everyone had the wool pulled over their eyes. How much longer could it continue?

Is this story really as black and white as I make it seem? Hell no, but sometimes I get carried away with narrative. Tune in tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion!

So let’s bring you up to speed. Today I’m going to lay out the bizarre and complex origins of the game itself. Despite the phenomenon that followed, Tetris had a pretty humble start in the world. Like everything else on the planet, it was an idea formed out of a liberally-manipulated plagiarism of another idea. Nothing new under the sun right?

Alexey Pajitnov came up with Tetris behind the Iron Curtain in June of 1985. He didn’t do it alone; he had help from two of his engineering buddies. At the time, Pajitnov had gained experience helping out psychology experiments with simple turn-based programs. Pajitnov was already a published developer by this point, albeit for very small projects, and he was about engage in a totally different direction. With the help of Dmitry Pavlovsky, they gave Tetris the action-oriented high-pressure style we’ve all come to love (after Level 20 especially.) Later, it was Vadim Gerasimov and his DOS skills that brought the game out of the Electronica 60 and into the IBM PC world.

Pajitnov drew from two major sources when he designed Tetris. First up is a simple game called Pentominos. The game uses shapes similar to Tetrominos (tetrads), but they can be five or even six blocks in girth. You would pick up the random shapes and try to fit them onto a board so as not to leave any spaces (usually you would add pegs to make it tougher.) Think of a single player Blokus without the diagonal restriction and you get the idea. The other source was Pajitnov himself. A year earlier, he had finished a project called Genetic Engineering. It spurred him into the idea of a closed, timed game that built itself from the ground up.

Can you imagine Alexey sitting at a table in the Soviet Academy of Sciences sharing his idea with his fellow co-worker? The fervor the two must have shared as they put the game together? The warmth of success as they watched their little blocks (made with green brackets) fall together across the dense monitor of their Electronika 60? The knowledge that they had just created something eternally amazing?

Well maybe it wasn’t quite the Rocky montage I made it out to be. But they knew they had done something right. The little game survived, getting passed from diskette to diskette all around the office. Eventually, they would they enlist the help of Gerasimov to render it in ASCII color blocks using an IBM PC. Trust me, back then, coloured ascii was impressive shit. The game was awesome; they knew it. This was gonna be something big.

And so Alexey released it to an adoring public, earning millions of dollars for his simple genius and inspiring the gaming culture of a generation! …Yeah, I’m lying. It wasn’t that simple. It never is. You see, back in 1985, the Soviet Union was basically insane. They decided that any creative work made within it’s borders was the property of the government as a collected effort of the people. They weren’t big fans of individualism. So Alexey technically didn’t own his creation. With no patent and the licensing controlled by crazy people in office…. well it didn’t make things easy.

Alright, I’m finally back in the swing of things! So what have I been up to? Who the hell cares right? The only thing you need to know is I’ve got that Russian monkey on my back. It happens every once in awhile. I start piling up blocks, fitting them all nice and neat, and then at some point I black out. I wake up in an alley with the game over screen and my pants are missing.

Okay, that only ever happened the one time. Look, we all know Tetris. We’ve all played Tetris. I bet people who don’t even LIKE the damn game have wasted away dozens of hours trying to stack them neatly. And as for the people who are into Tetris? I knew a guy who spent every single day trying to top his own high-score. Nothing strange about that, except it was the only video game he had in his repertoire other than minesweeper and solitaire. As for myself, I remember trying to break the barrier of Level 24 in the NES version. Eventually the game gets so fast that it becomes impossible. Or does it? I used an emulator to slow it down. I played for so long that the levels fell apart. I played for so long that hex junk started filling the screen and the colors wonked out. The whole time, I listened to George Carlin instead of the in-game music. I played for so long that I listened to his entire collected works three times in a row.

Oh sure, I’m crazy. But I’m not the only puzzle freak with a sad tale of tetris addiction. There’s just something oddly compelling about the game.

So what is Tetris? Yeah, yeah we all know the rules. But is that all there is to it? Is it just a simple puzzle game? Or does the game say something deeper about ourselves? Auntie Pixelante recently expressed her own views on the narrative of Tetris and what it means to tell stories in a game as a whole. Tetris is a game about managing your mistakes until you’re swamped beyond your control. What the hell, she might have a point right?

Personally, I have no idea. I’m not really a phallus-of-the-bard-everything-is-a-metaphor kinda guy. But even I have to admit: there is some inner force at work within us. It drives our love of Tetris and ingrains it into our gaming culture. There’s something universal and beautiful about it. It’s more than just another unique idea to keep puzzle freaks busy. In my opinion, Tetris is one of those few perfect ideas that will outlast all of the Mahjonggs, Sudokus, and other puzzle games for many years.

Hopefully by the end of the week, you’ll agree: there’s something deeply amazing about Tetris.