Ed Logg knew a thing or two about lines. He’d co-created Asteroids at Atari, a game where players piloted a ship and blasted the eponymous space rocks into smaller and smaller bits. Released in 1979, Asteroids was in black and white, but the animation was slick and fluid thanks to vector graphics, a technique that rendered graphics from lines.
But the game he was staring at was beyond anything he’d ever seen. On the monitor of an Atari ST, segmented lines in different shapes – a proper “L,” a mirrored “L,” a plus-shaped block, a straight line that could be flipped horizontally or vertically – rained down from the sky into stacks at the bottom. There was no one at the controls. It was an automated demo, what arcade developers called an attract mode.
As Logg watched, the AI guided the lines to fill in gaps in the stack. The lines could be flipped to face different directions as they fell, like puzzle pieces adjusted to fit their spaces. When blocks formed a horizontal line, it flashed and disappeared, and the score increased. Logg tapped a key and began to play. With every block he dropped and every line he filled out, his addiction grew. It was a puzzle, almost mathematical in its precise execution. Blocks fell, and he had to maneuver them into place to form horizontal lines as quickly as possible before the screen filled up.
Logg went to track down a manager. This game, Tetris, could be the next big thing on home consoles, and he would be the one to write it.
Curiosity guided Logg to computers. In high school, he enrolled in programming classes as a means of learning what made the machines tick. Programming fed the part of his brain that was addicted to problem-solving. After studying computer science in college, he was hired by Control Data Corp, where he wrote a little bit of this and that: games, Snoopy calendars, printable artwork. “I did conversions of the original Adventure and Star Trek between CDC Fortran and the IBM Fortran,” he said. “So although I was paid to support CDC software, I often did games on the side.”
Logg discovered Adventure, Atari programmer Warren Robinett’s game in which players controlled a square and explored simple dungeons and caves, at a Christmas party where someone had brought a prototype of the Atari Video Computer System (2600) game console. The following year, he built his own computer and wrote games for it. Games remained a hobby until a friend at CDC got a job at Atari, which happened to be across the street from the CDC offices. His friend encouraged him to apply, and he was hired in February 1978.
Logg worked in a group led by Dave Stubben, an engineer known among the team for what the rest of Atari called the “Stubben test.” A monster of a man at roughly 350 pounds, Stubben would beat, bend, twist, and perform handstands on hardware to test its durability. Logg’s first project was to finish Avalanche, a reflex-based game where players caught rocks as they tumbled from rows at the top of the screen to the bottom. The game had been started by Dennis Koble before he’d moved over to the consumer division to write games for the 2600. After Avalanche, Logg wrapped up another Koble title, Dirt Bike, but it failed Atari’s field test – putting a cabinet in the wild to see how players responded to it – and did not enter production.
Logg hit his stride when, in 1978, he answered Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell’s call for an expanded version of Breakout. The game, which Logg dubbed Super Breakout, bridged Atari’s past with its future. Super Breakout arrived in arcades in 1976, and became Logg’s first commercial hit. He rode his momentum when designer Lyle Rains proposed they team up to write a space game like Space Invaders, but with ships and asteroids that could move in any direction. That game became Asteroids.
The Calm Before The Storm
Things were looking up for Logg, but looking grim for Atari Nolan Bushnell. Atari’s co-founder had sold the company to Warner Communication in 1976, a move he admitted was “stupid” in retrospect, and stemmed from his failure to grasp the machinations of Wall Street. To shore up the company’s wild culture, Warner brought in Ray Kassar, a professional from the textiles industry, as a consultant. Kassar recalled wearing a suit on his first day only to be greeted by Bushnell wearing a t-shirt with 'I love to f**k' printed on the front. During a meeting later the same day, Bushnell interrupted proceedings to offer Kassar a cannabis joint. It was, Kassar went on to discover, only the tip of the iceberg of freewheeling drug use within the company. He left the meeting immediately. Smoking pot didn’t bother him. This was California; everybody lit up. He was bothered by the fact that they were lighting up at work.
In late 1978, following an argument with Emanuel “Manny” Gerard, the Warner executive who had pushed his bosses to acquire Atari, Bushnell was fired by Warner. (Bushnell claimed the decision was mutual in his account of the incident, and that he decided to quit around the same time Warner attempted to fire him.)
Kassar wasn’t sad to see him go. Atari couldn’t operate at tip-top efficiency with two bosses. Now firmly in charge, Kassar made the call to throw all of Atari’s weight behind the aging 2600 console, which Bushnell had wanted to put out to pasture. He swept away the clutter and chaos of the company’s laidback culture and replaced it with one rooted in order and efficiency. Instead of advertising its games only during Christmas, Kassar worked with marketing to promote the Atari brand year-round. Under his leadership, Atari, Inc.’s sales exploded from $75 million in 1977 to $2.1 billion in 1980. Shareholders were thrilled. Programmers were less enthused. They still weren’t receiving public credit for their work and had to resort to burying Easter eggs in their games. “It seemed more of a small company atmosphere except Time Warner did own us at the time,” Logg remembered. “There was certainly less management when I started than there was later.”
In 1979, after programmer David Crane and others had complained about the unfairness of compensation, the marketing department drafted a memo breaking down the most successful cartridge games. The purpose of the memo was to alert programmers to the types of software most popular with consumers so they could pivot to writing more games in that vein. Crane and several others interpreted the memo differently: Right there, in black and white, were sales stats for each game they’d made. To them, it was proof that they were valuable. In fact, Crane found that games he had programmed on his own had generated over twenty million in revenue. So why was he working overtime every week on a salary of $20,000?
Another programmer, Alan Miller, pitched Kassar and other executives on a compensation plan that would give programmers credit and royalties on their software. When management shot them down, Miller, along with Crane, Bob Whitehead, and Larry Kaplan decided to leave. Their cohort had made Atari over $60 million, and went directly to Kassar to inform him as much. According to Crane, Kassar told them they were no more important than the workers on assembly lines who dropped cartridges into boxes.
The “Gang of Four,” as they became known, walked away from Atari and founded Activision, the first third-party publisher to release games for hardware another company had manufactured, in 1979. At Activision, Crane went on to develop titles including Pitfall, an action-platformer that became the second-bestselling game on the 2600, after Tod Frye’s Pac-Man conversion.
Atari and Activision soon found themselves on common ground in 1983, when North America’s video game market collapsed under its own weight. Atari’s heavy involvement in the games business caused Warner to weather a loss of $425 million, leading the communications company to sell the PC and consumer divisions to computer tycoon Jack Tramiel for a song. Tramiel rebranded his acquisition as Atari Corp., while the arcade division continued as Atari Games under the auspices of Warner.
Through the turbulence, Logg continued to pump out games. One of his biggest hits was 1985’s Gauntlet, a dungeon-crawl where up to four players hacked and slashed their way through labyrinths displayed from a top-down perspective. Gauntlet was a success, but on a different scale than earlier games due to the aftereffects of the market crash. Over 7,800 Gauntlet cabinets were sold in ’85, but that was a far cry from the 70,000 Asteroids machines in operation around the world, making it Atari’s most lucrative coin-op title and the seventh highest-grossing coin-op video game of all time.
Logg, employed by Atari Games, soon gained a crystal-clear understanding of how far the company’s split went. “I had done a version of Centipede for the NES around 1986 when we learned that it was not clear if we could release our own titles in the consumer group,” he said. Logg had partnered with Atari engineer Dona Bailey to co-design Centipede, a shooter in which players open fire on a gigantic centipede as it wriggles its way down the screen, back in 1981. “So we had to [ask] the other company to find out what we could do. The result was we no longer owned any coin-operated titles created before the split in 1985, so I could not release my version of Centipede.”
Namco sold Atari Games to Atari Corp. in 1985, but there was another obstacle in the path to releasing home ports of Atari’s coin-op games. Nintendo had been credited with single-handedly resurrecting the North American games market that Atari had been somewhat responsible for killing. Recognizing that a lack of quality control over software had been one of Atari’s faults, Nintendo, riding high on the success of the NES, wielded near-total control over who could make NES games, how many, and how often. “A pain in the ass is a mild way to put it,” Logg said. “Think anti-trust.”
Atari’s designers went from being furious to cautiously optimistic when they exploited a loophole in Nintendo’s publisher-developer contract. According to its draconian terms, Nintendo permitted developers of NES software to release no more than five titles per year, a form of quality control to make sure the market wasn’t flooded with subpar games. Atari Games wanted to branch out from coin-op. To do so, it would have to form a consumer division of its own, separate from Atari Corp. It chose the name Tengen, Japanese for the central part of the strategy game Go’s board. Other publishers exploited the same loophole to produce more NES titles, such as Contra and Castlevania studio Konami establishing Ultra Games as a shell corporation that launched titles such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Metal Gear.
Nintendo permitted Tengen to publish games on NES. The two entities co-existed until 1988, when Tetris tore them apart for good.
From Russia With Fun
Soviet researchers Alexey Pajitnov and Dmitry Pavlovsky knew that all work and no play made for dull scientists. Employed at the Computer Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Pavlovsky noticed sixteen-year-old Gerasimov writing an encryption program for Microsoft’s DOS command-line operating system. They began to chat, and Pavlovsky said he liked to write games in his spare time, and introduced Gerasimov to Pajitnov. The trio decided to write a computer game of their own, with Gerasimov taking point as programmer and graphics designer. They warmed up by converting some of Pavlovsky’s older projects and daydreamed about selling a collection of their work, which they called a computer funfair.
A few weeks into their working relationship, Pajitnov came to his friends with an idea. A while back, he’d written a game called Genetic Engineering in which the player moved four-square pieces, called tetraminos, into groups. Gerasimov thought the game sounded like a bore, until Pajitnov rattled off ways he’d thought of improving it. Tetraminos would fall from the top of the screen into a glass jar-like enclosure, and would pile up unless the player grouped them to form horizontal lines, causing them to disappear. Excited, the three friends expanded the idea so two players could challenge each other to see who could clear lines the fastest. They called their game Tetris.
Though excited by their creation, the trio couldn’t simply drop floppy disks in a Ziploc bag – common packaging in the days before colorful boxes – and sell it in stores. They lived in a communist country, meaning the state owned Tetris, not its creators. Instead, they uploaded it to a network, where it spread across computers. Robert Stein, president of publisher Mirrorsoft, caught wind of it and approached Pajitnov with a worldwide distribution offer for Tetris. Stein secured publishing rights and turned them over to Spectrum HoloByte, where engineer John Jones-Steele converted it to the Atari ST.
That was when Ed Logg discovered it. Entranced by Tetris’s easy-to-pick-up-too-addictive-to-quit nature, he went to Robert Stein and negotiated distribution rights for Atari Games. Per their agreement, Atari Games would bring the game to arcades, while Logg would develop an NES port under the Tengen label. “I thought it was best for the home market because of the possibility of never-ending game play,” Logg explained. “I asked our management to get the license for the home market which they did via a sub-license through a couple of parties. It turned out later the contract was not very ironclad and the parties were not the most trustworthy to deal with.”
Logg kicked off the project by writing Tetris for Nintendo’s 8-bit Famicom. “I completed one version for the Consumer Electronics Show before the coin-operated game was started. When someone wanted it for the coin-operated market, another team took over,” he said.
Right around the time Logg was ready to get started, Nintendo threw up another roadblock. According to the manufacturer, there were shortages of the ROM chips that held code for NES games on cartridges. In order to satisfy demand, Nintendo would determine which companies would receive cartridges, and how many. Fed up, Tengen’s engineers decided to reverse-engineer the lockout chip, a little piece on every NES cartridge intended to prevent pirates from bootlegging software. They called their modification the Rabbit chip.
Logg found out about the project when he walked into Tengen’s lab and asked the three engineers huddled around a table full of hardware what they were up to. One of them looked up and said, “Don’t ask.”
Meanwhile, Logg continued his conversion of Tetris. He used no code that Pajitnov and the other Russian engineers had written, designing a look-and-feel replica by playing the game on a PC and retooling it with his own code. The basic logic, making pieces fall, was easy enough to implement. Within weeks, his game looked slicker and played more smoothly than the original. Logg focused on fleshing out what Tetris’s creators had built, adding a competitive multiplayer mode as well as a cooperative style of play where two players worked together to clear lines. Another improvement was gradually increasing the speed of falling blocks over time, a more subtle, flowing method than Pajitnov’s jumps in pacing. Whereas the original game’s tetraminos were each made of a solid block painted a single color, Logg’s were black and white at first.
“The first version for the January CES was probably more mono-chromatic,” he recalled. In advance of the June Consumer Electronics Show, he added colors and applied textures that gave each piece a segmented, 3D appearance. When Atari’s programmers were ready to develop an arcade cabinet for Tetris, Logg suppliedhis code as a foundation. The inverted process marked one of few examples when the console version of a game influenced arcade hardware.
After three years of work between the NES and arcade adaptations, Tengen sent its NES version of Tetris to Nintendo for approval in the spring of 1989. Once again, Nintendo hit the brakes, this time by ordering a pitifully small quantity of cartridges.
Behind the scenes, the company’s agents were working on locking down Tetris. That March, Bullet-Proof Software executive Henk Rogers flew to Moscow and met with bureaucrats to discuss licensing. The bureaucrats were happy to listen. They were aware of Tetris’s burgeoning popularity and were eager to make money off of the work completed by its creators. To their amazement, Rogers offered five million in exchange for the rights to all console and handheld adaptations, a much higher proposal than they had expected. Rogers bowled them over again by delivering a promise from Nintendo that the Japanese gaming giant would make up any differences if their royalties failed to reach the five million marker.
The rights to Tetris were summarily divided up like a holiday pie. Nintendo signed paperwork giving it worldwide rights (except in Japan) to Tetris on March 22, 1989. Mirrorsoft claimed Europe and, through its Spectrum HoloByte division, North America. Atari Games kept the rights to release its arcade version, and Bullet-Proof allowed Nintendo to bundle a portable version of Tetris with its Game Boy, due out later in the year.
When Two Tribes Go To War
Nintendo of America legal counsel Howard Lincoln wrote and submitted a cease-and-desist letter to Tengen on March 31, declaring that his company had secured all console rights. If Atari didn’t pull its Tengen-developed version of Tetris for NES from shelves, the two companies would settle the matter in court. All-out war followed, but both companies had fired shots earlier.
In December 1988, Atari filed a lawsuit accusing Nintendo of monopolistic practices centered on the company’s lockout chip. That same day, Atari Games announced that Tengen would release games without going through the proper channels established by Nintendo. There were three, Pac-Man, R.B.I. Baseball, and Gauntlet, with more on the way. Tetris would be the tip of that spear.
Nintendo couldn’t allow Atari to get away with selling unlicensed software for NES. Its executives believed its policies were the dam that held back a flood of poor software that would kill the North American game market for good. More to the point, Nintendo wanted control. The company responded by delivering a one-two punch. First, it countersued Atari for patent infringement on February 2, 1989. Concurrently it threatened retailers: Anyone who carried unlicensed game software for Nintendo’s hardware would suddenly find that its well of Nintendo products had run dry. Retailers capitulated. They had no choice. Nintendo was red hot, and they would rather lose a few Atari and Tengen games than their relationship with Nintendo.
Other software manufacturers in North America sympathized with Atari. Nintendo’s practices were draconian, but the fact was they depended on Nintendo for money. Atari sued again, demanding $250 million in damages from Nintendo.
The war raged until May 17, 1989, when Tengen, true to its word, released Tetris for NES. Not that anyone could find it. Few stores were brave enough to stock it, and Nintendo doubled down by filing yet another suit eight days later. Now both companies were accusing the other of infringing upon its rights to develop Tetris for consoles.
In June, Nintendo delivered a knockout blow when a Federal judge ruled in its favor, decreeing that Tengen and Atari were prohibited from selling any home version of Tetris, and had to recall all unsold cartridges. Executives from Atari and Tengen estimated that around 50,000 copies of the game had been sold. Hundreds of thousands were returned. Although Tengen continued to develop games – understandably throwing its weight behind Sega hardware, which rose up to challenge Nintendo’s iron grip on the console market – Ed Logg was devastated. He had fallen in love with his version of Tetris over working tirelessly for three years, only for a figurative handful of consumers to get to enjoy it.
“Heartbroken is a good summary. It was so much better than the version Nintendo did,” he said. Critics and players tended to agree. While there was no denying the addictive simplicity of the Game Boy port – and the NES edition Nintendo would release itself – Logg’s NES version boasted richer features and game modes than the editions Nintendo put onto the market.
“I was glad I had started working in the consumer area. I am greatly disappointed that my early efforts, Centipede and Tetris, did not make it out to the public,” Logg said. His awareness of support for his work buoyed his spirits and justified his labour. “To back this up, many years later when I worked for another company and we wanted to do a Tetris version on our platform, our management went to Blue Planet, I believe, who owned the rights to Tetris at the time. During the discussion they pointed out the best version they had ever seen was the version behind them. It was the Tengen version of Tetris.”
This feature appears in its entirety in David L. Craddock's book Arcade Perfect: How Pac-Man, Mortal Kombat, and Other Coin-Op Classics Invaded the Living Room, available now on Amazon.
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Comments 74
That was a fun read. Thanks!
I like NES Tetris better by far.
@LinktotheFuture same. I think there's some underdog syndrome with the Tengen version. It's not bad by any stretch but it's also not some stellar end all version of Tetris. Outside of multiplayer it doesn't bring anything hugely different. The NES version has better music and a better visual style.
Great article nonetheless. This was probably the most interesting era in video game history. It's hard to say if Nintendo was good or evil in the context of the time. They were overly tough and litigious but Atari did just royally screw the pooch years earlier and it was clear if someone wasn't going to be tough the same sort of greedy and crass behaviors would continue.
This article made me want a Gauntlet collection on Switch.
“Released in 1979, Asteroids was in black and white, but the animation was slick and fluid thanks to RASTER graphics, a technique that rendered graphics from lines.“
It’s actually VECTOR graphics. And not just a technique, but a vector monitor too. From Wikipedia:
“The electron beam follows an arbitrary path tracing the connected sloped lines, rather than following the same horizontal raster path for all images. The beam skips over dark areas of the image without visiting their points.“
Hope this gets updated.
I had a mint copy if tengen tetris back in my collecting days with all instructions, polystyrene inserts etc. This has kind of made me want it back!
Sucks to hear, but in the end it's all in the past and Atari kind of had no right to put their games on Nintendo's system without a license.
Besides, today we have Tetris games that far exceed the Tengen game. Of course, I'm talking about Tetris Axis, Tetris DS, Puyo Puyo Tetris, etc.
@Roam85 Dark Legacy
@sixrings great game and I’d want it in the collection with Legends.
And now that I’ve started on his gauntlet mental kick and I know games like Hyrule Warriors and Cadence of Hyrule exist... Gauntlet: Hyrule would be amazing.
I thought that was Dwight Schrute at first
TL:DR whats the gist?
The thing is, one of the main complaints about Nintendo's version, the lack of a two-player mode, is something that was actually partially programmed into the game. I wonder why they abandoned it. Did they run out of ROM space? Did they rush to get it out to market?
I would go with BPS' Famicom "Tetris 2+BomBliss" as the best Tetris variation on the hardware.
Though I'd probably rank Tengen's version next, then Nintendo's, and the first BPS Famicom version last (I'm guessing that version was a port of how Tetris first played, which is to say, the later versions such as "Nintendo" and even Sega apparently had refined the game into how we know it).
Thinking about it, this also left out Sega's 1989 Mega Drive version which suffered a similar fate in Japan, except that people say only a single digit number of genuine copies are known to exist. (seems the 2019 Genesis Mini version is a rewrite using some assets of the 1989 version)
Come please return to the wear-a-tux for a game launch party, instead of streaming with my PJs on 🙏
@aumgn Good spot, that has been updated
Great article, thank you for posting this excerpt. Fits right in with the book’s topic of arcade consoles coming to the home, and Tengen did exactly that for the NES.
Back then, even as a12-yr old, I knew about the unlicensed Tengen ports and admittedly thought they were a great addition to the library. No where else did we get arcade ports of Super Sprint, Road Runner, & SEGA Master System games like Alien Syndrome (fun 2-player simultaneous game!). Their quality wasn’t bad either!
The 80’s and 90’s were such a fun time for video game consumers.
But.. but... Nintendo is our best friend!!!
Tengen Tetris is by far the best version of Tetris. I remember buying a copy at a store near me, soon after the game was no longer available anywhere.
But Tetris DS still came out...
So did Warner sell Atari Games to Namco at some point?
There’s a confusing part in the article in which we learnt that Warner sold the consumer and PC division of the business to Jack Tramiel who rebranded as Atari Corp. Warner held on to the coin-op part of the business which remained as Atari Games.
But then we learn that Namco sold Atari Games to Atari Corp?
TL:DR Just look up History of Tetris Gaming Historian on YouTube.
@Tasuki Exactly. Excellent in-depth video, rendering this article a bit pointless.
Great read. This battle is had long term consequences for Nintendo.
1. Third parties more and more avoided working with Nintendo after the Super NES. Nintendo's move towards cartridges for the Nintendo 64 only accelerated this. Square and Konami planned on Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid going to the N64 and decided Sony after this move.
2. The Switch is the first time where major third parties are once again looking into Nintendo, likely due to the popularity of the console.
3. Strange enough, now Nintendo has gone completely the opposite direction and has basically no quality control mechanisms in place for Switch. The eShop is full of hot garbage. They need to find a middle ground of sorts.
I'd also love to see those mid 80s-early 90s arcade titles from Atari/Midway on the Switch
While I think there are better versions of tetris now (The New Tetris on N64 is my favorite on consoles for its additional color-ed scoring which made the game more strategic, with Push Tetris for the NDS coming in for handhelds), I can definitely salute Logg's version. In my headcanon, this was a Russian success story selling a game internationally and even bringing people together in America. Sounds like the truth was a lot more divisive, unfortunately.
You can manipulate what pieces you get in Tengen Tetris making it hard to not cheat. The Nintendo version is better but it's fun to have multiple ports, even on the same console.
@RileyR I guess it was a slow news day.
@RileyR @Tasuki Can you guys please post your comments in video form in future so we can properly understand them? Thanks.
Tengen Tetris is superior mostly for the coop mode that has rarely ever appeared in any future Tetris versions other than the boxed retail copy of Tetris Party on Wii
Interesting article but it definitely needs some editing to make some things clearer, for example the involvement of Namco another user commented on, and the division of the rights' pie.
Who is Bullet-Proof Software? How did Nintendo get worldwide distribution rights if another company had the rights to Europe and North America?
It's a shame because it's the most intriguing part of the story.
@hadrian I logged in just to make a comment about how Tetris DS is the best Tetris.
The good thing that came out of this is at least Nintendo made sure Robert Maxwell didn't get his greedy hands on Tetris.
I'd love to try Ed Logg's NES port of Centipede. Wonder if it's out there in prototype form.
Blimey, that was a long read.
Why can't I just download this information directly into my brain?
Lazy journalism.
Nice article. Tengen tetris certainly had some interesting ideas, but personally it's one of my least fave versions.
@Damo sure, we could even strech the point out over a 10 minute long video so enough ads can be fit in.
@Damo I totally get your point and agree with you, that it is dumb to compare the mediums.
But also think it would be cool if we could post videos and pictures in the comments
I never knew the Tetris I "owned" was this original Logg one. I say "owned" because it came on one of those 64-in-1 game cartridges out of Hong Kong. Guys were selling such games out of their garage and would mod the NES for you too.
It was so good, especially the multi-player mode, including the co-op mode where it often became a race to stick a certain piece in a gap, which often ruined the game for both players. It was so funny. It was much more colourful too, and I actually didn't understand why the "official" Tetris, when released, looked so inferior.
I actually think the best Tetris is The New Tetris on N64. I loved that you could create gold and silver super cubes that were worth 10 and 25 lines (if I recall) in one hit. A gold cube was four of the same piece (could only be four cubes, four right L's, four left L's or four sticks) to create a super cube, while a silver cube was any four pieces to construct a super cube. Next best is Tetris DS (loved the push mode where you'd duel to push your opponent of the screen), then I'd say NES.
I haven't gotten to play Tengen Tetris on NES, but I saw some gameplay videos. The additional modes and features look neat, but stylistically I prefer Nintendo's version honestly. Specifically the color palettes, and Music Theme 3. Man, do I love that theme.
Also, I think Tetris DS is the best Tetris game.
I think the best Tetris is already the Game Boy version so Nintendo didn't killed the best Tetris, they reinvent it.
@Roam85 Get the gauntlet prototype!
I always thought the Tengen version was better... until I played it. I still prefer the NES version (not Famicom), but Tetris DS is better still. Tetris Effect on PSVR has too many distracting elements to be a great Tetris game.
Interesting. Although you could argue Atari killed it just as much as Nintendo. Obviously the licensing situation was a mess and maybe Nintendo could have been more lenient and worked with them there, but the whole selling unlicensed games? Yeah, it's no wonder Nintendo had no mercy!
@Roam85 I have been hankering for a Gauntlet for a long time. Blue Elf shot food.
@kingbk The GameCube, GBA, DS, and (2/3)DS also had excellent third party support. Technically so did the Wii, although it that case there were a lot of really disappointing ports and alternate releases compared to what the PS3/X360 got.
Also, the Switch eShop at least has better quality control than WiiWare did.
@idrawrobots Same here. IMO Tetris DS makes any other version except for Tetris 99 irrelevant.
@Coalescence "Outside of multiplayer it doesn't bring anything hugely different." Uhhh...multiplayer is a HUGE DEAL for a Tetris game. That alone makes this version superior, nevermind it having a better algorithm too. It's like comparing an imaginary version of Mario Kart that has only a single player mode to multiplayer. Almost doesn't even matter if one version looks a little better.
@Menardi Tetrisphere is one of the best puzzlers out there, but it's not Tetris.
NES Tetris is the best Tetris game ever made. Still play it from time to time.
This is wrong " Namco sold Atari Games to Atari Corp. in 1985," Atari corp was a totally separate company from Atari Games. I know the history of Atari is confusing but...
@NandN3ds Atari split into two companies when Warner Brothers dumped it after the 1983 video game crash.
Atari corporation would be the computer/home console version of Atari. It is also the one that had the rights to arcade titles prior to 1985 (which is why you never see Asteroids, Centipede and Missle Command in a package with Paperboy, Super Sprint or Marble Madness). It sold to Hasbro and now is owned by some French entity.
Atari Games focused on arcade titles (Paperboy, Super Sprints, Marble Madness). Warner Brothers sold it to Namco, who sold it back to Time Warner, who then sold it to Midway, who then was bought by... yep, Time Warner once again.
If I remember correctly, Tengen Tetris has insta-drop when you push down. It would take me a while to get used to this. Sort of like when you have been playing modern Tetris and go back to an older version that doesn’t allow you to swap pieces. You have to re-adjust your gameplay.
@kingbk Yeah, I was just pointing out the mistake in the article.
I have a “loose”copy of Tengen Tetris ,I dunno maybe I am one of the few who think the Tengen version of Tetris is better then the “official “version for the NES ..
What a brilliant read, thanks Damo.
@DWWM The article gets the history wrong. After selling the home console and computer division to Jack Tramiel (who named it Atari Corporation), Warner held on to the arcade division as Atari Games Inc., because Tramiel wasn't really interested in video games; he mostly wanted the home computer division so he could use it to get back at Commodore, the company he founded but had been forced out of in 1983. Atari Corp owned the rights to the Atari name and Atari Games could only use it for arcade machines and only with "Games" fully attached.
After a short while, Warner sold a majority share to Namco, which had at one point been Atari's arcade distributor in Japan, and they installed new management. Namco soon lost interest in owning a separately operating company that was essentially a competitor (as opposed to just a subsidiary to act as a distributor), so they sold their portion to Atari Games management (which had been originally installed by Namco). Warner retained their 40% share throughout.
It was then that they started to do the third-party publishing thing, and, because of the limit on using the Atari name outside arcades, formed Tengen as a home publishing subsidiary; it had nothing to do with Nintendo's licensing limits (the article is confusing unrelated elements).
After all the unpleasantness with Nintendo was settled, in 1994 Time Warner (as it was by then known) reacquired full ownership (having never sold their minority stake) and renamed the whole company Time Warner Interactive. After only three or so years, though, they lost interest again and sold TWI to Midway, which had just been spun off into a standalone company, and TWI became Midway Games West. (Not to be confused with Midway Games San Diego, the former Tradewest, which Midway's then-parent WMS Industries had bought a couple years before so they could publish home games themselves instead of licensing their arcade games to Acclaim as had been done for the first couple of Mortal Kombat games; they had decided there was no reason to share the profits from that very lucrative series, and so MK3 was published by Williams not Acclaim like the first two.)
Eventually Midway shut down the former Atari Games studio, then later the San Diego studio as they went bankrupt. What was left of Midway was acquired by ... Warner Bros. Can't make this stuff up. All Atari Games arcade titles after 1985 are now owned by Warner Bros. Interactive, as is the Midway (and old Williams) library.
Atari Corp never reacquired the arcade division (the article is also wrong there), and never made another arcade game. They also never amounted to much. The 7800 was delayed because Tramiel and Warner couldn't agree who needed to pay the designers (Tramiel eventually paid, reluctantly). Atari Corp's ST line of computers weren't the Amiga killers they were intended to be (they did ok, but both were crushed by the rise of Microsoft). The Lynx was an afterthought on the market, and the Jaguar was so disastrous that Atari Corp went under. It merged with a hard drive maker which then sold the name and back catalogue to Hasbro, who, after the dot-com bubble burst, sold what was left to Infogrames, a French publisher that renamed itself Atari SA. That's the only current Atari, which owns the pre-1985 library and licenses it out for those Atari Flashback consoles.
@clvr
The whole issue with Tetris rights is an hour long story in itself. I recommend watching the hour-long piece on it by the Gaming Historian (it's on YouTube). It's very well presented.
As for commenting on the games themselves, as someone who actually owns both the Nintendo and Tengen NES versions, I disagree that the Tengen version is necessarily superior.
Yes, it's two-player. But unlike more recent two-player versions (starting with the Game Boy) there's no "garbage" that appears on the bottom of your opponent's stack when multi-line clears occur, so it isn't really two players directly competing, just two players that happen to be playing at the same time. All it really does is save time with having to alternate. (This isn't mentioning the co-op mode, which is actually rather silly and annoying if the other player is not good at the game).
Also, the Tengen version plays stiffer, in part because of how the blocks rotate. But the entire discussion of Tetris rotation systems is a long one. Graphically, it's a bit of a wash. The Tengen screen has a bit more going on, but because of that (due to NES technical limits) the tetronimos themselves are kinda bland, with dull colors, no highlights, and a uniform grayness once locked into place. The Nintendo pieces just have a glossy highlight to them that looks good, and they change color each level, which is fun.
@Tandy255 No, Atari Tetris, both the arcade and the NES port, do not have hard drop where you can drop the block instantly, but instead pushing down soft drops the piece, where it moves faster, but isn't instant. Indeed, the Atari arcade version was the first version to have that. All previous computer versions had hard drop only. Sega's Japanese arcade version, the first version released in Japan and recently ported anew to the Genesis Mini, also is soft drop. The Nintendo NES and Game Boy versions follow the soft drop model as well. Modern Tetris games allow both, with hard drop often mapped to up on the directional pad (ironically, enough).
You may be thinking of the original Bullet-Proof Software Famicom version, which for some reason is often the version used in multi-game retro consoles like the AtGames Flashback line, or one of the earlier computer ports. Those have hard drop only. Worse, or more confusing to players of later versions at least, in the original release of the Famicom version, down on the directional pad was rotate and the A button was drop. That's been switched in the re-releases, as down-for-drop is just plain more intuitive, but it's still hard drop-only.
@oknazevad Thank you for clarifying!
@DarthKirby
I adore Tetris Effect. It’s one of my favorite versions and one of my favorite PS4 games. I didn’t even play it in VR since I don’t own a PSVR.
I grew up with the NES version. It was ironically the only game my grandparents would play with me as a kid. We all took turns playing and trying to survive as long as possible.
The version I’ve sunk the most time into since then is Tetris 99. God I love that game.
Whew, what a read, that was fascinating though.
I must play this. Your ps5 and series x for this game!
Great read. I only ever played Tetris on Nintendo systems and they have been largely joyous. Especially Tetris DS, Axis etc.
The Tengen was the one I grew up with because I had those bootleg 100 games in one type of things.
All this, while I'm hearing that a non-Nintendo-published Tetris game, Tetris Effect, is getting so much praise for well... Tetris. Can someone tell me what makes Tetris Effect so special?
Tetris 99 is the game that keeps on giving. Seriously, I play it once a day for at least 20 minutes.
@Kabloop to be honest in my experience Zelda 2 was loved. My close friends liked it. It had buzz on the playground. Magazines wrote positively about it. It was popular enough to get a second grey cart print.
Id say the revision came from the AVGN video. Then all of the sudden across the internet it became a “bad game”. As has happened with many games that were once loved until featured on avgn. People just sheeped. Many probably not even having played the game. They dont get that it’s just a slow and the show’s creator didn’t actually hate the game.
Game is finally going back to its former glory, where it belongs.
The Norwegian made Twintris from 1990 on Amiga is the best, and also have the best soundtrack in any Tetris game ever made by legendary Walkman. I think Twintris were made
Twintris gameplay were only beated by Tetris 99 because of online, but still have superior soundtrack to T99.
@HalBailman The New Tetris is the coolest version of the game I’ve ever seen. I don’t know why it’s never hyped, but damn it’s multiplayer was just the best.
@Ironcore Atari was mad that Nintendo was very careful about quality control. They wanted to make more games than they were allowed to, so they hacked the lockout chip and started illegally manufacturing games for the NES. Surprise, they lost in court and had to recall their illegal copies of Tetris.
Nintendo was a bit draconian with their tactics, but is Atari forgetting that they literally crashed the console video game market just a few years before (1983) and that Nintendo, through Herculean efforts, forced console gaming into a rebound? Atari allowed the market to be flooded with an endless supply of overpriced shovelware that consumers had no way of even knowing what they were buying before they'd made their purchase.
Nintendo came along and set some real standards. Did it prevent, occasionally, good developers from putting out their products at the rate they wanted? Absolutely. But it also prevented a second crash of the console market. This article makes Atari and Logg seem a bit like victims, but it doesn't mention the thousands of companies that were trying to sell nearly non-functional games for the NES to scam customers and make a quick buck. Nintendo rightly believed they had to defend their stance on quality control because it was otherwise looking forward to a sea of endless trash and scamming.
Tengen/Atari knew what it was doing was illegal. They knew they may lose in court. But they hoped if they got the games out to market, it would be too late by the time the lawsuits finished up.
Also, it's worth noting two other things. The first is that while it's certainly possible and maybe even likely, there is absolutely no direct evidence beyond general suspicion that Nintendo threatened stores about stocking their games. Toys R Us and other retailers as well as Nintendo vehemently denied these claims. So while they still could be true, taken it as known fact is just.. ludicrous.
Second, tons of fans far prefer Nintendo's Tetris. Tengen isn't largely regarded as the better Tetris. And by the reading of the article title, you'd think it was the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail, the greatest Tetris iteration of all time, lost to the ages. I had Tengen Tetris and didn't play the Nintendo version until many years later. It was a solid game, but I ended up preferring both Nintendo's NES iteration, as well as the Gameboy version. The visual design and music really sell a puzzle game for me. Tengen had such an unappealing visual design and the music was bland. It didn't encourage me to play for hours.
@Tim_Vreeland Zelda 2 was critically panned by a number of news outlets at its release and was frowned upon literally decades before AVGN even existed. There's a reason Nintendo didn't replicate that style. Honestly, it's not a bad game. It just didn't feel as much like Zelda and it wasn't as good as the first. But a lot of series have those odd sequels that end up having cult following fanbases anyway.
Tetris DX is the GOAT(etris).
I'd argue it's not the best version of Tetris if we count the Famicom, Tetris 2+Bombliss I'd say is a better game than both.
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