YMMV / Tetris

• Accidental Innuendo: When you clear five lines at once in Magical Tetris Challenge, the game calls it a "Pentris"^note from the prefix penta-, meaning "five". Which sounds like a combination of "penetrate" and "penis". ^note It doesn't help that Rule 34 greatly took advantage of it. This is perhaps why Puyo Puyo Tetris calls it a Tetris Plus instead.
• Adaptation Displacement: The original version was released in 1985. The world-famous Game Boy version was released four years later. Given that the original version was exclusive to the Soviet Electronika 60 microcomputer, its relative obscurity is perfectly understandable.
• Americans Hate Tingle: Tetris 2 on Nintendo's platforms generally has a very poor reputation in the west, for feeling more like an inferior clone of Dr. Mario than a Tetris sequel. In Japan, however, it wasn't promoted or titled as a sequel (it was actually called Tetris Flash there), so it tends to be remembered as just one of many oddball spin-offs to the original.
• Annoying Video Game Helper: The Super Rotation System's "kick" system in modern Tetris games is designed to help players squeeze pieces into tight spaces and, at high gravity, climb pieces over small bumps and hills in the stack. Unfortunately, when it comes to the former, it's near-impossible to squeeze in a piece, especially pieces other than the T (and the O/square, for obvious reasons), because SRS seems to bias in favor of kicking up rather than down.
• Awesome Moments: Achieving the Grand Master rank in any of the TGM games, especially in TGM 2 and especially in TGM 3.
  • For the NES version, reaching level 30 would be comparable — a feat only accomplished by 3 or 4 (disputed) players worldwide. This is due to the DAS being too slow, pieces falling at 1/60th of a second per gridcell with no fall delay, and instant piece lockdown, making it impossible for players incapable of hyper tapping.
  • The Game Boy version has its own, albeit lesser form of this: beating Level 9, High 5.
  • Pulling off a T-Spin Triple. Or an S-Spin Triple or Z-Spin Triple, even though few official games recognize them.
  • Winning 1st place in Tetris 99.
    TETRIS MAXIMUS!
• Awesome Music:
  • While the Game Boy version's arrangement of Korobeiniki needs no introduction (after all, it is now the de facto theme song for Tetris), the often-overlooked Music C from the NES edition is a very calm and relaxing theme. The NES Music A, a version of "The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies" from The Nutcracker is also fondly remembered—and used for the Tetris screen of I Wanna Be the Guy.
  • The tunes from the Arcade game and its Tengen NES ports are also pretty great and highlight the game's Russian roots, with "Loginska" and "Bradinsky" being original compositions that could easily be mistaken for real Slavic folk songs (for the record, they aren't; composer Brad Fuller titled them after both himself and programmer Ed Logg).
  • The Commodore 64 version's music is a single track almost 26 minutes long without looping, which is seriously impressive.
  • Practically the entire soundtrack for Tetris Effect qualifies. Given that Noboru Mutoh, the mind behind cult-classic reactive music game Rez, was the game's sound director, this comes as little surprise.
  • The CD-i version had a very chill and relaxed set of tracks composed by Jim Andron that helped offset the issues the game had, especially for just how much it stands out from other Tetris games' soundtracks.
  • The incredibly catchy Tetris 99 menu theme.
  • The Final 10 theme from Tetris 99, a fast paced electronic remix of "Flight of the Bumblebees", of all things.
  • Tetris: The Grand Master has some badass tracks of its own, perfect for its signature brand of extra-hard block-stacking. See its YMMV page for details.
  • Magical Tetris Challenge is an often overlooked entry in the series, but it has a surprisingly snappy soundtrack for a Disney tie-in game. Masato Kouda, who has done work for some of Capcom's most famous games, was the composer for the console version. Have a listen to the playlist here.
  • "TRIP" from 1999's Sega Tetris is often considered one of the game's best tracks, if not the best.
• Broken Base:
  • The Tetris Guideline and other efforts by the Tetris Company to establish a particular image for Tetris. Sure it's good enough for casual players, and some argue that it helps curb quality issues when it comes to games carrying the Tetris license, but competitive players largely dislike what TTC does with the series, as well as the Double Standard of games like TGM getting rejected due to deviating strongly from the TTC's vision of Tetris while Obvious Betas like Tetris Ultimate get the OK just because they meet the TTC's requirements.
  • Rewarding T-Spins: Does this new avenue of bonuses provide a fair incentive to try difficult tricks, or does it go against the spirit of the series?
  • The Super Rotation System: Is it a fair Anti-Frustration Feature that makes for more creative gameplay, or is it too convoluted to understand or a Game-Breaker?
  • Is the "goal" system in the Marathon mode of modern Tetris games a clever take on the "clear lines to level up" system, or is it an unbalanced mess for effectively punishing Tetrises?
  • Which line of "classic" Tetris games is better: Nintendo's or Sega's? Similarly, Nintendo's vs. Tengen's version of NES Tetris.
    • This has bled into the audiences for the Nintendo Switch, with both companies having released a Tetris game on it, with Tetris 99 for Nintendo and Puyo Puyo Tetris and Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 for Sega.
  • The "Infinity" mechanic, also known as infinite spin/rotation. To summarize: When a piece lands, there is a small delay before it locks into place, and moving or rotating a piece will reset that lockdown timer. It's routinely been called a Game-Breaker and "it's fine, it doesn't affect more competitive modes" and almost nothing in between, and Edit Wars and Justifying Edits have broken out a few times whenever the mechanic is discussed on This Very Wiki.
• Common Knowledge: The Sega Genesis Mini version of the game is often thought to be the finished version of the scrapped port for the original Genesis, but is actually made from whole cloth specifically for the Mini.
• Covered Up: While it is common knowledge that "Korobeiniki" is an old Russian folk song written decades before Tetris, you'll still find people referring to it as "The Tetris Theme" or "Type A" rather than its original title.
• Default Setting Syndrome: Due to the "A-Type" theme, a rendition of "Korobeiniki", being the default theme in the 1989 Game Boy version, it's easily the most iconic piece of Tetris music, with the "B-Type" and "C-Type" themes being relatively obscure in comparison.
• Difficulty Spike: As a homage to TGM's drop speed scaling, reaching the 500th line in Tetris 99's "999 Line Mode" will suddenly cause all subsequent pieces to drop at roughly 5G speed, in stark contrast to the previous 499 lines where the rate of speed up is much more gradual. From there on, the speed gradually accelerates even further as you approach the goal until you eventually hit 20G.
• Fandom Heresy:
  • Say that you dislike Nintendo's versions (especially the Game Boy version), even just to explain that you like other Tetris games better. It will not end well.
  • Try saying that Korobeiniki isn't the best Tetris track, or is overrated. Just be prepared to be chased down by a mob of angry fans.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The pieces are officially named after the English letters they most closely resemble: L, J, S, Z, I, O, and T. However, many players will often call the S and Z blocks "squigglies" or "zig-zags"; the O block "square", "big block", or "fat block"; and the I block the "line piece" or "long block".
  • Tetris 99 instantly picked up the nickname Tetris: Battle Royale in the West when it was revealed, due to essentially being a battle royale-styled competitive Tetris game. Japanese players likewise call it Donkatsu Tetris, referencing the Japanese localization of the victory catchphrase from Player Unknowns Battlegrounds.
    • Unsurprisingly, a win is called a Chicken Dinner or a Victory Royale.
  • SEGA's Tetris games are sometimes called "Monkey Tetris" due to the distinctive monkey mascot.
  • There is a version of Tetris for the Game Boy that has a different Music A, instead of Korobeiniki. This version has been nicknamed Minuet Tetris by the fandom.
  • In the NES version, level 29 is known as "the Kill Screen". Although it's not truly a killscreen, as the game is still technically playable (tool-assisted gameplay has found that the game starts crashing around level 230, making that the "true killscreen"), the speed instantly doubles when that level is reached, making it so merely holding a direction on the d-pad is not fast enough to get a piece to the furthest edges of the board, effectively making the game unplayable without employing some advanced Button Mashing techniques. Although some Tetris players have since become skilled enough at said techniques to keep playing well beyond the killscreen, the name stuck.
• First Installment Wins:
  • Any time someone brings up Tetris, the Game Boy and NES versions almost always come to mind.
  • Tetris is so popular that its sequels in the Tris series (Welltris, Faces... Tris III, and Hatris, all of them also developed by Alexey Pajitnov) are rarely even mentioned and have yet to be re-released.
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • Atari/Tengen Tetris, Tetris DX, and Tetris: The Grand Master featured wall kicks years before the introduction of the Super Rotation System in Tetris Worlds. However, in these three games, the kicks don't have the properties that make them feel broken at high gravity; Atari Tetris and TGM only allow kicking in horizontal directions, TGM3 only allows one upward kick for certain pieces, and while DX has piece climbing, it requires a flat wall to work.
  • TGM has a combo system, but it's balanced out by being more biased towards multi-line clears; in particular, the combo only starts or increments when clearing two or more lines, and is merely kept when clearing a single line. Even in the second TGM game, where an off-by-one error causes Tetrises to not have a bonus when performed as part of an active combo, Tetrises still contribute better to the player's grade than focusing on combos (plus getting to the M-roll requires a certain number of Tetrises per 100-level section anyway). This allows for consecutive line-clearing pieces to be rewarded, but not in a way that leads to the stagnant "center 4-wide" metagame that Puyo Puyo Tetris is infamous for nor does it favor a "clear one line at a time, many times in a row" approach like "Goal"-based Marathon modes in later games.
• Gateway Series: Tetris 99, which was released for free to Nintendo Switch Online subscribers, seems to have caused a second wind of sales for Puyo Puyo Tetris.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Or rather: The World Loves Tetris. Practically everywhere you go even outside of Russia, the game is synonymous with the Falling Blocks genre. In Japan, Sega and later Arika produced Tetris games aimed at maximizing game speed, with Sega's 1988 version becoming a smash hit in arcades.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Sega's 1988 version of Tetris uses the exact same RNG seed every time the machine is powered on, resulting in what is known as the "Power-On Pattern". With some planning, you can take the guesswork out of achieving high scores, especially the maximum possible score.
  • Tetris DX's rotation system allows pieces other than the O to climb back up, simply by rotating them so that they kick off of walls. Since the game awards points just for soft-dropping pieces, someone went and made a tool-assisted run that reaches the score cap before clearing a single line.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • There was apparently going to be a Tetris movie that was described as an "epic, sci-fi thriller." There already is one.
  • Similar to the above, Apple Plus is going to release a film of the game, but the plot will instead focus on the Freakier Than Fiction drama of how the Cold War became one of the game's greatest obstacles.
  • Back when Bribing Your Way to Victory was a new thing, Penny Arcade joked that one day you'd need to pay real money for I-pieces. Several Tetris games do now charge real money for other basic features, like smooth controls and piece previews.
  • This image◊, which parodies Fortnite's Battle Royale mode by replacing its characters with tetrominoes, was made almost a year before Tetris 99.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Some fans dislike newer versions, particularly those that use the "bag" randomizer^note each group of 7 pieces is a randomized permutation of all 7 tetrominoes, as a measure to avoid piece droughts. So if you drop 70 pieces, for example, you're guaranteed to have dropped 10 of each type of piece., because they avert the Fake Difficulty caused by a completely random generator (e.g. a large quantity of S and Z pieces and a drought of I pieces). Others criticize the inclusion of "Hold" pieces (a slot that you can put your current block into and get the piece in the slot in its place, or skip to the next piece if there's no piece in the Hold slot yet), "ghost pieces" (shadows/outlines that indicate where the piece will fall and what orientation when it's dropped), and more streamlined rotation system and physics for being "unnecessary" beginner-pandering features.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: There are not many fans of the Big Block DLC for Tetris 99, due to providing very little for the 9.99 USD cost: a Marathon mode that's similar to the one in most other recent Tetris games (other than a higher speed cap than most other modern Tetris games) and a vs-CPU mode that many feel should've been part of the base game (i.e. you're basically paying for an offline mode in an online-by-default game). The cost does cover a second piece of future planned DLC, being a DLC season pass, but not many are optimistic about it.
• Memetic Badass: The L block is shaped like a boot to kick your ass! It steals Tetrises from the I block! It killed Link and Cloud in the GameFAQs character battle! And so forth! The I block is badass too, of course, but it's meant to be and so doesn't have the same appeal of the L block.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Boom! Tetris for X", courtesy of the Classic Tetris World Championship.
  • Tetris 99 is the popular puzzle game's grand entrance into the Battle Royale genre. This◊ image of the Grim Reaper (portrayed by Tetris 99) killing DayZ, Player Unknowns Battlegrounds, and Fortnite, and preparing to off Apex Legends, circulated everywhere after the game's announcement.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The sound when you clear four rows of blocks in the Game Boy version.
  • The "Level up" sound in the NES version.
  • From Tetris 99:
    • The robotic "KO" when you eliminate another player, followed by the dinging of you receiving badges for your effort. It's one of the few sound effects that isn't changed by the choice of theme.
    • The fanfare that players when 50 players are left, and the more triumphant one that plays at 10 players are left.
    • Overlaps with Awesome Music, but this results theme as it only plays when you've bested all over players in a match.
    • The little "sploosh" when you place a block in the Splatoon 2 theme is a serious contender for the most satisfying Tetris drop sound yet. Also worth mentioning are the Inkling voice clips for clearing a line in the same theme. (Woomy!)
  • In Puyo Puyo Tetris, the sound that plays when achieving a Back-to-Back is very rewarding. There's also the enthusiastic "Tetris!" chants made by the characters, and the increasingly exciting spells as you send more and more lines.
  • The escalating musical notes as you get more and more lines made in Zone mode in Tetris Effect.
• My Real Daddy: While Tetris was developed by Alexey Pajitnov, a Russian, the game is more commonly associated with Nintendo, a Japanese company, due to the runaway success of the Game Boy version. While downplayed in that many folks do acknowledge its Russian roots, it's the elements of Nintendo's versions that are most iconic.
• Never Live It Down: Despite introducing new gameplay elements that would later solidify the Tetris Guideline in Tetris Worlds (a game also contested), The New Tetris is mostly known for the massive, hidden rant by David Pridie.
• Newer Than They Think: "Korobeiniki" is commonly known as the Type-A music in the Game Boy version. This is true for Version 1.1; Version 1.0 (only released in special Japanese bundles) uses "Minuet" as the Type-A music.
• Nintendo Hard: The version on tetris.com features 30 levels where past level 19, tetrominoes instantly drop to the floor and the lock delay gradually decreases until you don't even have enough time to manipulate the tetromino anymore.
• Obvious Beta: Ubisoft's version of Tetris Ultimate on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One is notorious for having lag issues, as well as crashing entirely.
• Older Than They Think:
  • The Game Boy and NES aren't the original versions of the game; the first version of Tetris was released on an Elektronika60 computer in 1985.
  • Puyo Puyo Tetris is far from the first time Sega has released a Tetris game; their first one was in 1988 (actually a year before Nintendo's iconic 1989 Game Boy version). Of course, this is unlikely to be known by the average Western player, as Sega's Tetris games have traditionally been either localized but gone under the radar at best and kept away from Western audiences at worst.
  • The Ghost Piece feature was introduced in the original Tetris: The Grand Master, where it was called the "Temporary Landing System".
  • Tetris Effect is not the first time that Interface Screw has been an integral part of a Tetris game; the DOS game Tetripz from the 1990s would distort the gameplay visuals as its main gimmick.
• Polished Port:
  • The unlicensed NES version by Tengen is this for the Atari arcade version, featuring a wide variety of new options like multiple background tracks to listen to and a Co-Op Multiplayer mode where two players share a single extra-wide field. It also introduces a second rotation button, which is absent in the arcade version.
  • Most fans, especially in the West, are quick to poo-poo the Genesis Mini version of Tetris due to not seeming to provide anything new and not understanding what's so innovative about classic Sega Tetris. To those who do understand why Sega Tetris is such a big deal in Japan, it's a port of the 1988 Sega arcade version by M2 with arcade-accurate graphics and sound, and button assignments that let you add clockwise rotation and hard drop buttons, neither of which were in the original arcade version nor the 1989 prototype Genesis version. It's also the first new^note It's actually built from the ground up, not based on the prototype Genesis version version of Tetris in over a decade to not be subject to the Tetris Guideline^note Different piece colors, different rotation system, different lock delay system, no hold pieces, 1-piece preview, leveling up is based on a hidden counter of sorts rather than strictly on lines cleared, "Korobeiniki" is not part of the soundtrack.
• Porting Disaster:
  • The Philips CD-i version is considered this to some for having loading times for each level up just to render nature backgrounds which also forces the game board to be off-center. The main saving grace nowadays is, as mentioned above, its surprisingly good soundtrack.
  • Ubisoft's Tetris Ultimate on the PS4 and Xbox One. It has severe slowdown, framerate drops, and a tendency to crash frequently.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: With Hold Piece introduced in modern games, players may choose not to hold any pieces for a classic Tetris experience.
• Signature Song: The arrangement of "Korobeiniki" from the Game Boy version practically serves as the series' flagship song, to the point where the Tetris Guideline mandates its inclusion in Tetris games. If anyone brings up Tetris music, this is easily the first song that comes to mind.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Tetris Effect seems to borrow a lot of mechanics from Tetris: The Grand Master, although there has been no word as to whether Tetris Effect is officially The Tetris Company's answer to TGM just yet.
• That One Rule: Super Rotation System in modern Tetris games governs, among other things, how pieces will be shifted if they try to rotate but a wall or other blocks is preventing the rotation, also known as "kicking". This isn't a new concept, as many older Tetris games have kick behavior too, but SRS's form of kicking involves complex arbitrary tables that depend on the type of piece and its rotation state. This means pieces can rotate into some extremely unlikely spots (thus enabling things like T-Spin Doubles or even T-Spin Triples, which involves a rotation kick that displaces the T into entirely new cells), or they can instead pop back out without the player being able to wrap their head around the logic.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Versions of Tetris that don't have "Korobeiniki" — specifically, versions made after the 1989 Game Boy version, the first game to feature it^note The exceedingly rare first version of the Game Boy Tetris didn't have it; it used a track called "Minuet" for Music A instead. — often get panned simply for that track's exclusion, no matter what features or refinements they add to the formula, or how awesome the other music in the game is.
  • Purists are not terribly keen on the quality-of-life changes introduced to later games.
  • Others don't like the introduction of the T-Spin bonuses due to encouraging strategies that come off as incredibly counter-intuitive (T-Spin Triple, especially, due to requiring a very specific and difficult-to-assemble setup and being worth more than a Tetris in some games) and would rather spam Tetrises all day like in older games. In a similar vein, multiplayer fans dislike the way combos are rewarded from Puyo Puyo Tetris onwards, as it leads to the "center 4-wide" metagame that is seen as stagnant and not terribly exciting.
  • The Updated Re-release Tetris DX for the Game Boy Color is roundly disliked, both for the distracting animated backdrops and for its new Korobeiniki-free soundtrack. Many fans still scratch their head to this day over how Nintendo could have messed up something as simple as adding color to the original Game Boy port, which most people would have very happily settled for.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • The Tetris: The Grand Master series introduced Initial Rotation System, which lets you pre-rotate the next piece by holding down the button corresponding to your desired rotation direction in the small delay between when a piece locks and when the next piece spawns. Tetris: The Grand Master 3 introduces an offshoot of this called Initial Hold System, which lets you swap out the next piece with whatever is your current Hold piece immedately once said next piece spawns. Both features are extremely useful at high gravity but have not seen wide adaptation to main Tetris games.
  • Tetris: The Grand Master 2 introduces what is known as "firm drop" or "sonic drop", where you can quick-drop a piece but without locking it, making filling in overhangs much faster. (To compare, a "hard drop" instant-drops the piece and locks it in place immediately.) It has unfortunately never been used in a main Tetris game; you have to use the also-non-locking-but-slower soft drop instead.
  • Double/co-op mode, where two players share one extra-wide field, can be a fun exercise for friends who like playing Tetris together, but very few Tetris games have it (Tengen's unlicensed NES port of Atari Tetris, Tetris: The Grand Master 2 PLUS, and Tetris Kiwamemichi which notably allows four players to use the same playfield at once). Tetris Effect: Connected has a variation where three players start on independent boards, but upon filling a shared Zone meter will join the three boards together to send Connected Zone Attack lines to a solitary boss.
  • Until the late 90's, "lock delay" (pieces having a delay between when they touch down and when they become locked in place) was mostly exclusive to Tetris games by SEGA and Jaleco; the first game to include it is SEGA's 1988 Tetris arcade game. Nintendo's NES, non-Color Game Boy, and SNES Tetris games as well as Atari's arcade Tetris game and accompanying NES port, all of which are more well-known in the West, don't include lock delay despite making high-gravity play (more specifically, "pieces fall so fast they'll hit the floor before they hit either side wall" levels of fast) possible at all.
  • Tetris 99 has the music change at fixed numbers of opponents remaining. For some reason Marathon doesn't do something similar, even in 999 Line mode. Have fun listening to the same rendition of "Korobeiniki" for over an hour.
  • Spin (i.e. twist) bonuses only apply to the T-piece. Tetris Party Deluxe is the only Guideline game that awards anything extra for doing, say, a "J-Spin Double" or an "S-Spin Triple", even though those are just as challenging to set up and pull off as their T equivalents.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Tetris Effect goes above and beyond in terms of visuals.
• Win Back the Crowd: After Ubisoft's exclusivity contract coupled with their disastrous Tetris Ultimate damaged the reputation of the Tetris name, the Western release of Puyo Puyo Tetris and Tetris 99 seem to have renewed people's faith in modern Tetris games, the former featuring a colorful cast of characters including Tetris-representative characters and the butter-smooth gameplay that comes with a lot of Sega Tetris games and the latter being a unique Battle Royale twist on the multiplayer formula made by the same developers of the famous TGM series.

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