It's new to me: Tetris 2

A sequel to Tetris, but also not a sequel to Tetris at all.

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Tetris! Everyone knows Tetris, except for that one movie critic, anyway. It’s one of the best-selling video game franchises of all-time at 495 million sales, behind only the entirety of Mario and ahead of serious moneymakers like Pokémon and Call of Duty. The mobile version EA released back in 2006 is the third best-selling video game ever with 100 million paid downloads, behind Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto V, and ahead of pack-in game Wii Sports. And if you really want to split hairs, the franchise has sold over 100 million more games than the Super Mario series, the cornerstone of Mario’s dominance over all, has managed in its 38 years.

You know what Tetris is, you know what it looks like, you know how it plays. So it’s kind of wild to rewind the clock a bit and realize that this sort of thing we’re very used to wasn’t always set in stone. The sequel to Tetris, Tetris 2, is very much not Tetris. It has the name, and it has a bunch of the people behind the incredible popularity of the original Tetris backing it, but those things alone do not make it Tetris in the sense we think of it. Tetris’ sequels tend to iterate on the gameplay of the original to various degrees, but Nintendo’s sequels (and sometimes “sequels,” Puzzle League/Panel de Pon says hello) to Tetris were wildly different affairs — puzzle games, yes, and with plenty of quality, but the “Tetris” part of things could feel more like marketing than truth sometimes.

And Nintendo was in a position to make sequels to Tetris because of their relationship with the original game, which, in a lovely bit of symbiosis, was as important to the Game Boy as a pack-in game as the Game Boy was to it. Tetris is incredible, its greatness obvious, but it maybe doesn’t become the all-time most dominant puzzle game series in existence like it has without being attached to a handheld that also took the world by storm, tens of millions of units at a time. After all, Tetris existed before the Game Boy, but not at the scale it would after that relationship began.

Image credit: MobyGames

So, yeah, Henk Rogers, who helped (but was certainly not alone in) bringing the creation of Alexey Pajitnov out of the Soviet Union and into the rest of the world, kept in touch with the Big N, because why wouldn’t he have? Which is how Rogers’ studio — Bullet-Proof Software — and Nintendo partnered on an official sequel four years after the launch of the Game Boy version that sold enough to be considered a killer app.

Known as Tetris Flash in Japan but Tetris 2 elsewhere in the world, the focus here was not on clearing whole lines. Instead, you cleared sets of three blocks of the same color, and each stage started with a number of blocks already in place that needed to be cleared in order to complete the level, and I’m just describing Dr. Mario now, aren’t I? Well… sort of. Tetris 2 is fascinating, in that it can look and play quite a bit like Dr. Mario sometimes, but it’s also got some, but not a whole lot, of Tetris in it. Which ended up creating a game that is neither Tetris nor Dr. Mario, but if you’re familiar with those two series, you can see pieces of both of them in here.

While the gameplay borrows from 1991’s Dr. Mario in some respects — the initial level setup of some isolated blocks or groups of blocks to clear, previously static pieces that become detached through matches and fall until they hit something solid, falling blocks being made up of different colored blocks, the manipulation of blocks in order to maneuver them into the tiniest spaces you can, my being nowhere near as good at the game as my wife — it also differs in some pretty important other ones. You don’t have to clear all of the blocks that the stage starts out with, for one: in Dr. Mario, all of those viruses have got to go, but in Tetris 2, you just need to match and clear the few with a flashing white light on them — hence the Japanese name of the game. The block shapes are also wildly different, too, and that’s where some of the Tetris comes in: these do look like Tetrominos! Sometimes kind of warped, mutated ones in new shapes and arrangements, and sometimes only very loosely connected so that when you put down one angle of a piece the rest just slides off and keeps going, but in Dr. Mario you just had colored pills that were always that same two-block size. So this is clearly much more Tetris than Dr. Mario, shapes-wise.

It is kind of funny to make a game called Tetris that doesn’t include the act of completing a Tetris — when you complete four lines at the same time — but Tetris 2 does have its own impressive, screen-wiping wrinkle. If you match six blocks of the same color together at once, all of the non-flashing blocks of that color will also disappear, causing the rest of your blocks that were supported by those to fall down. That can start a cascade effect that clears more of your screen than a Tetris ever did, and can easily give you a second life if you were struggling and close to running out of real estate for your still-falling blocks.

Despite all of these differences from the original and Nintendo’s clear Dr. Mario influence on Tetris’ numbered sequel, Rogers’ studio was a developer on the SNES version of Tetris 2, giving this real clout as a true sequel to Tetris instead of the Tetris 2 developed for the ZX Spectrum in 1990, which hadn’t originally been developed with a commercial release in mind until the rights were sold off to a publisher, and not by anyone associated with the version of Tetris most of the world was familiar with. The art style present in the SNES edition looks more like something you’d find in later Tetris entries, such as the Playstation’s Tetris Plus, than in a Nintendo game of that era or any other.

In retrospect, however, knowing where the series would go, Tetris 2 is very blatantly not building on Pajitnov’s all-time classic in any way other than through its name. Sega’s Columns deviated a bit from the original independent developer’s version of it, and the sequel deviated even further, but the central premise of Columns held throughout the franchise’s run: Tetris 2, despite the number designation, feels more like a spin-off of Tetris than a true sequel, given what came after. The more honest name of the game isn’t Tetris 2, but Japan’s Tetris Flash, so again, we’re pointing to this being a numbered sequel more for marketing purposes than anything.

None of this is a negative, by the way! Sequels don’t have to be duplicates of the games that preceded them. Tetris 2 is a lot of fun, but it’s not fun for the reasons Tetris was and is. Tetris 2 feels like a game from the 80s more than the 90s, in that it’s a sequel to a highly successful game that tried to be something completely different the next time out. The Adventure of Link to Tetris’ The Legend of Zelda, as it were, in an era where people were getting used to the idea of playing A Link to the Pasts instead. So, it wasn’t a lie or anything like this to call the game Tetris 2: maybe there was thought given to Tetris as a franchise name more than a particular puzzle to be iterated on at the time, and Bullet-Proof (and eventually, The Tetris Company) would later decide, like so many other developers and publishers, that no, perfecting that first vision, experimenting with building on that foundation, that’s the way to go. Only with hindsight and so many Tetris games later does Tetris 2 feel more like it’s out of place and incorrectly named.

Tetris 2 released on three different platforms, and the only one of them that was considered a critical disappointment is the NES edition (though, it should be said, it still sold well on the NES, which was nearing its end at this point). The Game Boy one is portable, so right there, that’s a win, even if the graphics are scaled back a bit to accommodate the 8-bit hardware, meaning, rather than specific colors to match, you’re more matching shading. Playing Tetris 2 on a Game Boy Color or Super Game Boy adapter for the SNES does make them more explicitly colors, at least, but all of the additional art, characters, and little flourishes (like the board filling/emptying out of water as you played in multiplayer) were nonexistent. This, like the original Tetris on the Game Boy, was a pretty bare bones affair. But like with the original Tetris, that didn’t detract from the fun: even in a pre-Game Boy Color world, people didn’t seem to mind so much, as it scored worse than the SNES edition with critics, but spent multiple chunks of 1994 as the top-selling game on the platform.

The SNES edition let you play multiplayer without needing a second system and copy of the game, but both that and the Game Boy version of Tetris 2 let you face off against the computer if you didn’t have a pal to play with. You couldn’t see what your computer opponent was up to on the Game Boy, however: instead, how many blocks they had remaining just showed up as a number on the sidebar alongside your own figure, so it feels even more explicitly like a race against the clock. This also means they aren’t directly impacting your own game after managing a combo that sends over some troublesome speedy blocks, like on the SNES. You do, however, have a ceiling crashing down on top of you the longer it takes you to make those matches, so it’s not as if playing the computer is a breeze. Tetris 2 can be pretty difficult on the higher levels (or for someone like me, who is much better at traditional Tetris than anything even remotely in the ballpark of Dr. Mario, the medium levels, too), so even playing solo you’re going to have quite the puzzle workout here.

It’s a shame that Tetris 2 has kind of faded to the point that I only somewhat recently even knew it existed. It being different from Tetris at the time might have been odd for some critics and players in a way that drove everyone involved back to the original formula for later sequels, but there’s a damn fine puzzle game here, and it should get a second chance, especially in a world where Nintendo is putting both SNES and Game Boy games up on their Switch Online subscription service. What are those services for, if not being able to include something that might surprise people, at no risk to the company making it available?

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