Tetris: The Soviet Mind Game

TETЯIS: The Soviet Mind Game
Tetris' title screen.
Publisher	Tengen
Developer	Tengen
Console	NES
Date	May 1989
Sound engine	Mirrorsoft
Alternate names/hacks	Tetris II (usual title on multicarts) 1990 New Game Super Tetris II

TETЯIS: The Soviet Mind Game is a variant of Tetris developed and published by Tengen for the NES in May of 1989. The game was only on shelves for four weeks before Tengen was legally forced to stop manufacturing and distributing the title.

It is a port of the arcade game VS. Tetris for the Nintendo VS. System, itself a port of the Atari Games arcade version of Tetris. The game shares many similarities with the Bullet-Proof Software-developed Famicom version of Tetris, like the theming, gameplay, and even a good portion of the game's soundtrack.

Gameplay

The game has five modes, 1 Player, 2 Player, Cooperative, Vs. Computer, and With Computer. However, the game notably does not include the level mode from the Atari Games arcade version of Tetris (in which the player completes a set of levels with new gimmicks added every fifth stage), due to it being based off VS. Tetris (which was actually licensed by Nintendo).

The first mode, 1 Player, is a normal Tetris game in which the player clears lines to score points; after each 20 lines, the game will calculate the player's score based off of how many Singles, Doubles, Triples and Tetrises the player pulled off. This mode is almost identical to the original gameplay of the BPS Famicom version, aside from hard dropping being replaced with soft dropping, and rotation being mapped to the A and B buttons while soft dropping is mapped to down on the D-pad. 2 Player is the exact same as 1 Player, except that two players are both playing simultaneously on separate boards against each other. Cooperative involves two players cooperating in order to clear lines and score points simultaneously within the same board. Both of the Computer modes are identical to the two previous modes, albeit with the second player being a CPU.

This version also has multiple different music tracks that the player can choose to listen to during gameplay, unlike the Nintendo-developed NES version which only has two tracks. The player can select Loginsky, Bradinsky, Karinka, Troika, or silence. The two lattermost music tracks, alongside the option to choose silence, are also featured in BPS's Famicom version of Tetris as well.

This version's gameplay is often considered to be superior to that of Nintendo's NES version, as it supports multiple different modes and has more options to choose from on the menus.

Development and history

After seeing Tetris run on an Atari ST, programmer Ed Logg petitioned Atari Games to license it for an arcade version, and approached Stein. With the rights secured, Atari Games produced an arcade version of Tetris, and under their Tengen subsidiary, began development to port the title to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in June 1988.

Mirrorsoft later sub-licensed the rights to Henk Rogers of Bullet-Proof Software to distribute Tetris in Japan. Around this same time, Nintendo was asked by Bullet-Proof Software with the prospect of developing a version of Tetris for the Game Boy, and Rogers traveled to Moscow to secure permission to distribute Tetris with the Game Boy. However, because Stein had secured the rights from Pajitnov directly and not from the Soviet authorities, their Ministry of Software and Hardware Export stated that the console rights to Tetris had been licensed to no-one, and that Atari Games had only been licensed the rights to produce arcade games with the property.

In April 1989, Tengen, who had previously filed an anti-trust suit against Nintendo, sued Nintendo again, claiming rights to distribute Tetris on the NES; Nintendo counter-sued, citing infringement of trademark. The Tengen version of Tetris was ultimately released in May 1989, albeit as an unlicensed NES game. In June 1989, a month after the release of Tengen's Tetris, U.S. District Court Judge Fern Smith issued an injunction barring Tengen from further distributing the game, and further ordered all existing copies of the game be destroyed. As a result, 268,000 Tetris cartridges were recalled and destroyed after the game only four weeks on shelves.

In an interview, Ed Logg noted that the Tengen version of Tetris was built completely from scratch, using no source code or material from the original game. After presenting the title at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Tengen president Randy Broweleit requested that improvements be made to the game. Originally portrayed solely in black and white, Broweleit requested that the pieces in the game be portrayed in color, and Logg altered the game accordingly prior to the next Consumer Electronics Show. When asked as to which version of Tetris he liked the most, Logg stated the Nintendo version of Tetris for the NES "wasn't tuned right", citing a lack of logarithmic speed adjustment as the source of that version's overly steep increases in difficulty.

Trivia

• Alongside the BPS Famicom version of Tetris, this version of Tetris appears often on multicarts, with the Tengen version typically named Tetris II on menus. Multicart versions also often tend to omit the title screen (replacing it with a plain text title to save ROM space), the high score screen table, and the credits.
• Multiple prototypes of the game were found by The Hidden Palace, including two that were almost identical to the Vs. version and another one being the earliest version featuring "LICENSED BY NINTENDO OF AMERICA INC." meaning that the game was originally planned to be an officially licensed game.
• If the reverse R on the title screen is read in Cyrillic, the game's name would be "Tetiais/Tetyais".

References

This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Wikipedia (view authors).