Soapbox features allow our individual writers and contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random things they’ve chewed on. Today, Tim looks back on 35 years of Tetris on the Game Boy and reflects on how it taught a generation – several generations, in fact – how to play these new video games…
Everyone has to start their gaming journey somewhere. For an entire generation, Tetris was this gateway to the Game Boy.
This nascent entry in the budding puzzle franchise was to Nintendo’s inaugural handheld what Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is to the Switch, meaning that if you owned a Game Boy, you were statistically likely to own Tetris. This can largely be attributed to the fact that the game was out in North America and Europe until 1993, ensuring that it was the first cartridge that most people popped into their Game Boy out of the box.
Making Tetris as the first ever game for new players was genius on Nintendo’s part. Video games—especially those that used what we now think of as traditional controller layouts—were still Relatively new concepts in 1989. For context: the D-pad had launched on Nintendo devices just seven years earlier with the Donkey Kong Game & Watch. Even though the NES was making waves in the interim, the general public was still coming to terms with moving through two-dimensional digital spaces with a combination of directional buttons and buttons.
Since Tetris requires only basic inputs to pilot, it was the perfect craft for teaching people of all ages how to play video games. To that end, this was the ideal game to guarantee it each owned since the beginning. This was especially important for a handheld owned by many children who may never have touched a controller before, but would probably choose Mario over geometry if they bought cartridges à la carte.
We often take for granted how difficult it is for someone who is not gaming literate to understand basic gaming fundamentals.
I can vouch for its educational qualities, as Tetris for the Game Boy was my younger self’s first game (albeit in the mid-90s) and started me with the gaming know-how and motor skills I still use today. . Let me walk you through exactly how the game taught me and other players of the time how to play.
The Game Boy iteration’s controls, which existed before the expanded feature set people are familiar with from later Tetris entries, boiled down to two types of input: moving the tetromino across an invisible grid with the D-pad and pressing the “A” and “B” buttons to rotate them around 90° clockwise or counterclockwise. This meant that every button (except ‘Up’, which I’ll touch on later) provided immediate and easily recognizable feedback, with a clear delineation between their functions. In comparison, Super Mario Land – the other major release of the Game Boy launch window – required more complex combinations of button presses to navigate. By assigning exactly one task to each button and requiring no multiple button combinations, Tetris was so well learned that reading a manual (which kids will likely skip) was not necessary.
At this point the hard part is done. The player can play the game functionally, which is the foundation upon which they will naturally build agility and speed through practice. However, they still may not be quite ready for the more complex inputs and abstract gameplay concepts of Super Mario Land.
We often take for granted how difficult it is for someone who is not gaming literate to understand basic gaming fundamentals. I’m talking about my own experience as a kid with a Game Boy, trying to beat King Totomes’ fireballs in Super Mario Land when I accidentally missed him and needed a neighbor to help me beat the old man in Viridian City at the beginning of Pokemon Red and Blue (that same neighbor would go on to scare the life out of me by calling up MissingNo.). Yet Tetris never faced any such obstacles for me, as the game is rooted in an early childhood toy that every child knows: building blocks.
By grounding the game in the real-world concept of stacking objects that kids learn from toddler play, a general understanding of what’s happening on screen is baked in. Perhaps most children will not immediately understand that they have to fill the rows with blocks, although enough accidental dropping of the tetromino will inevitably result in the line being erased, probably even during the process of learning the controls. The game makes a big fanfare of the event by pausing the action, flashing cleared lines, playing a sound effect, and increasing your score, zero lines, and level. All possible indicators indicate that you have succeeded, even if initially by accident.
Once a connection is made between a player’s action and a winning state, the floodgates are opened for formulating optimal dice patterns, driving them into bottlenecks, and recovering from mistakes. In the process, the tetromino’s movement and rotation inputs blend into one fluid motion, paving the way for control schemes that require more from the player. The rest is history; now you’re a gamer for life, kid.
would we be here without the skills that the 1989 entry gifted a generation of gamers with, and how did it launch Tetris’ popularity into the stratosphere?
It is important to emphasize that Tetris for the Game Boy was so successful as a teaching mechanism due to its simplicity compared to later titles. For example, while the ability to hold a tetromino to deploy at an opportune moment massively increased the strategic depth of the formula, its absence here worked in favor of providing a simpler framework that never risked overwhelming the player with mechanics. A feature like this could have been mapped to “Up”, but it would have led to undue confusion at a time when gaming was still new to most people. Likewise, if “Up” triggered a hard crash, it would probably be more jarring to the layman than a button without a function.
These features make modern Tetris games more compelling. Even the most nostalgic gamers would find it hard not to admit that Tetris Effect and Tetris 99 are better than the franchise’s simpler days. However, these and other updated arcade classics can afford these complexities because the language of game controls is deeply ingrained in our culture; most children understand digital interfaces by the time they can hold a controller.
So the new Tetris games meet the needs of their generation of gamers, just like Game Boy Tetris for 80s and 90s kids like me. But would we be here without the skills the 1989 entry gifted a generation of gamers with, and more generally, how it launched Tetris’ popularity into the stratosphere? It’s worth remembering this seminal record for the special place it holds in gaming history as we celebrate our 35th anniversary.
And hey, why not check it out on the Nintendo Switch Online Game Boy app, if only to hear that iconic theme blast?
Is there a particular Tetris game that played an important role in your life? Let us know in the comments.