As we speak sees the publication of Henk Rogers’ memoir, The Good Sport—Tetris: From Russia With Love. Rogers has had a protracted and storied profession within the video games trade, however he’ll undoubtedly all the time be best-known for his affiliation with Tetris, and particularly his main function in extricating it from the Soviet forms and getting the sport’s creator, Alexey Pajitnov, the credit score and cash he deserved.
The ebook is a rollicking learn, with the Soviet sections within the Eighties nearly veering into John Le Carre territory at factors, and I will be writing up some ideas on it quickly. However the publication additionally gave PCG the possibility to sit down down with Rogers and focus on his profession, the various gaming luminaries he is identified and, in fact, Tetris.
A shocking facet of the ebook is that the sport we all know as Tetris was initially fairly completely different. Virtually the entire components that outline it are there, however a mixture of Rogers and Nintendo made additions and modifications which might be fairly basic to the sport everyone knows and love now. I advised Rogers that Tetris for me will all the time be the Sport Boy model, and requested him to talk a bit of to the variations between what we all know as Tetris now versus what it was.
“So the unique Tetris was a survival recreation,” says Rogers. “It is like, how lengthy are you able to survive? And so within the very first Elektronica 60 [version] it wasn’t actually about scoring factors. It is like how lengthy are you able to final earlier than you high out? And you bought bonus factors for hard-dropping. You push a button and the piece falls right down to the underside. The upper you hard-drop, the extra factors you get. You’ve gotten one level for every line that it drops.”
The Elektronica 60 was a Soviet pc and form of a bootleg PDP-11 that was broadly used from the late Nineteen Seventies into the ’90s and even past. It is the {hardware} that Pajitnov initially programmed Tetris for however, as a result of the machine could not do raster graphics, the blocks had been fashioned out of letters.
“That was the unique recreation,” continues Rogers. “There was no scoring for line clear: that got here later. I had the expertise in Japan of arcade video games like Pac-Man or Area Invaders, you play the sport for some time after which there is a second the place they only tally the rating. And what that does is it has all people perceive how the factors are scored.
“The unique variations of Tetris, once more, whenever you’re enjoying, you’ll be able to’t play and watch the rating on the similar time. You are enjoying. So individuals did not have any thought how they had been scoring factors. So I needed to make it clear.”
So Rogers’ first main contribution to Tetris was a scoring system, however he would get much more granular about how this could work in-sync with the character of the sport.
“Then I invented single [line clear], double, triple, and Tetris as a strategy to make extra factors, particularly on the decrease ranges, on the slower ranges I ought to say. As a result of individuals who bought adept at it, they needed to endure via the sluggish ranges to get a excessive rating. And so I give them one thing to do, which is obvious a couple of line at a time.
“Gamers would then be capable of perceive the place the rating got here from. So I did break it up in that method. And that is the best way the Sport Boy labored and that is the best way the NES model labored. And that is completely different from the originals, that are principally infinite, you recognize, and there is no break.”
Clearly the idea of a survival recreation is its personal style nowadays, and Rogers definitely is not evaluating Tetris to Valheim. However it does really feel like an correct description of how the sport initially labored and one which, had been you to disregard the scoring system and different subsequent additions, nonetheless holds true: Tetris is at some stage about seeing how lengthy you’ll be able to final earlier than failing.
Alexey Pajitnov will all the time be the creator of Tetris. However Henk Rogers was way more essential to the sport as we now understand it than a mere licensor.
