Tetris Forever interview: “It’s a game that will outlive all of us”

Tetris Forever is coming on November 12th to PC and consoles, and it’s a game that includes fourteen (14!) games, all collected up and put together into a game-come-documentary from Atari and Digital Eclipse.

Ahead of the November release, we had an opportunity to speak to Chris Kohler, editorial director of Tetris Forever at Digital Eclipse. We had a chance to ask about the new, the old, the movie, and a lot more. So without further ado, let’s get into it.

What were the developers’ first memories of Tetris? What console or version of it was your gateway drug into the series?

CK: I’m sure everyone has a different story, but for me it was the Game Boy version. We bought our Game Boy in 1989, and of course, it had Tetris packed in. For me it was more like something to play after I’d finished Super Mario Land. I was never any good at it! I have the same story everyone else has, which is that that old black-and-white Game Boy ended up getting played quite a bit more by our moms who were glued to Tetris.

I think when we first got a CGA monitor so we could see our IBM computer produce graphics in four extremely weird colour choices, the first thing we fired up was Tetris. Dan Amrich, our content manager at Digital Eclipse, was extremely into the Spectrum Holobyte MS-DOS release in college.

As developers, you have spent a large amount of your career specializing in the emulation of retro games. Tetris aside, which games are you most proud of bringing to more modern consoles, and what does the future hold?

CK: For me personally, what we’ve been able to do with the Gold Master Series has been really fulfilling. Jordan Mechner’s Karateka is one of the most influential games of that era, but it’s in danger of being forgotten about if you can’t access the original, and if you don’t have the context to understand why it was so impactful on a generation of game developers. Similarly, Jeff Minter’s early games from prior to Tempest 2000 were pretty difficult to access, and they’re such personal works of art that you can’t really understand them unless you understand the person who made them.

The thread running through the Gold Master Series so far is the fascinating stories of the people who made these important games. As long as there’s a compelling story that reinforces the notion that games are works of art made by people, we want to be there and figure out a way to tell that story in a way that you can only do inside an interactive documentary video game.

Tetris has been around for 40 years. Do you see any further evolutions in the series/format beyond Time Warp?

Of course – that’s why we titled the game “Tetris Forever”! It’s a game that will outlive all of us.

Have you seen the Tetris movie starring Taron Egerton, and what did you think of it?

Of course! The first thing I thought when watching it is that it was a very strange feeling to see Egerton, who I only knew from Rocketman, up on the screen portraying a person I actually known in real life! The second thing was that, while it’s of course true that the film is a dramatized Hollywood-style telling of the story, I feel that it captured the emotional truth of Henk Rogers and Alexey Pajitnov’s experiences. Henk really was taking a serious risk in going to Moscow on a tourist visa with the intent of locking down the Tetris rights, and he did have a lot on the line when push came to shove and there were different entities all competing for those rights. Meanwhile, Alexey himself was taking a considerable risk, under the Soviet regime, by inviting this American businessman to his home and befriending him.

Alexey Pajitnov is an interesting and charismatic guy, what are your experiences of meeting or speaking with him when putting together Tetris Forever?

I’ve gotten to talk with Alexey a few times, but getting to sit down with him at length for this project and hear all of his stories while we filmed the video segments was a lot of fun. Not only that, but when we got Alexey and Henk together, they just played off of each other and the stories got better and better – you can really tell they have a strong friendship even today, which is what’s at the core of the game’s ongoing success.

What is your favourite Tetris incarnation of all time and why?

So I mentioned that I was never that good at Tetris. When we started this project, I knew I had to achieve at least some kind of competency! So I turned to a game that I’d played some of when it first came out in VR – Tetris Effect, by Tetsuya Mizuguchi and the team at Enhance. We knew at this point that we wanted to interview Mizuguchi-san and talk about Tetris Effect in the timelines of Tetris Forever, but I also just wanted a Tetris game to play on my Switch that would let me practice and practice. When I cleared the last stage, I was pretty much freaking out! I still wouldn’t call myself an expert or anything, but now I really know how to play. And of course, it helps that Tetris Effect’s presentation is so beautiful – I think it’s the best Tetris ever made.

Given how popular Tetris was in the West, particularly on the Nintendo Game Boy, do you have any insight into why the superb Tetris Battle Gaiden never got a Western release? I am delighted to see it appearing on Forever as I believe it is one of the more underrated Super Famicom games of all time.

At the time, Nintendo had the worldwide console rights to Tetris everywhere but Japan, where Bullet-Proof Software, Henk Rogers’s company, still had the rights. But that meant that BPS couldn’t release those games outside Japan. Beyond Tetris Battle Gaiden, BPS’s other games like Tetris 2 + Bombliss on the Famicom, which was made by some of the key creators of Dragon Quest as essentially a fan passion project, and Super Tetris 3, which contains a variety of interesting variants, are also very good versions of Tetris, and I’m hopeful that fans outside Japan will try these out for the first time! Of course, Tetris Battle Gaiden is absolutely the one that everybody’s most excited about because it is so unique and so much fun with two players.

What do you think it is that makes the Tetris concept so addictive and compulsive?

I think Gilman Louie, the founder of Spectrum Holobyte, puts it well in one of the videos we have in Tetris Forever – it’s a pure game loop that gets you into the “zone” very quickly, and keeps you there, right at your level of challenge.

Were any of the titles on Forever tricky to emulate or recreate, and why?

We have a painstaking recreation of the original version of Tetris, the one that Alexey programmed himself on the Electronika 60 computer in 1984. That involved studying the original closely, even looking at old videos of Alexey playing it on a real Electronika computer, to confirm the behavior and the placement of the text characters. A lot of work went into that to make it as close as we could to what it felt like to play the original game. The monitor bezel is even a photo of a vintage Electronika monitor, the one currently sitting in the Tetris office in Honolulu.

The Spectrum Holobyte Apple II game is also trickier than console games, just because you have to do a lot of work to take a game controlled by a computer keyboard and map everything to a joystick. Beyond that, you also have to think about what state the game is in – if you’re in a menu, you want Down on the directional pad to move the cursor down, but if you’re in the middle of gameplay, you want Down to drop the piece, right? Well, those are two different keys, so you need to know what state the game is in so you can assign the right button. That’s just a small example, but that’s why you don’t often see vintage computer games emulated in a console collection! Fortunately, all the work we did on The Making of Karateka and Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story comes into play here, so we have engineer-designers on staff who are old hands at this by now.

What kind of games do you guys like to play in your spare time?

If I get any spare time, I’ll let you know! Ha ha! I am sort of kidding, and also sort of not! I’ve tried to actually carve out some time during the work days for competitive analysis – as part of my job I need to understand what’s going on in other classic game releases. When I’m actually playing video games for fun, I’ve been staring at the new Zelda and watching trailers of the new Mario & Luigi RPG and dreaming about having some time to sit down and play them at some point. I think I get a Christmas break.

Can you tell us what your favourite puzzle titles of all time are, Tetris aside?

If Professor Layton counts, I’ve played all of them in both Japanese and English. When’s the next one coming out? That’s another one I need to block out some time for.

If you were selling this package to someone that had never played Tetris before, how would you sell the documentary and games to them? What element of the package are you most proud of?

“First of all,” I would say, “congratulations on being the only person in the world who has never played Tetris. It’s a fascinating game with an amazing story behind it – it was created in the Soviet Union in 1984, and the story of how it got out from behind the Iron Curtain and spread like wildfire around the world is something we tell in full in this game. It’s not just a collection of Tetris games, it’s an interactive journey through Tetris history that will let you get hands-on with historical versions of the game while you learn about where it came from and where it’s going. Hopefully by the end you’ll understand why it’s called Tetris Forever.”

Tetris Forever is coming to PC and consoles on November 12th.