Quote:Original post by Oluseyi
Quote:Original post by Garmichael
I think the Gameboy helped, but i dont think that the gameboy is why Tetris is the number 1 most copied game in the histopy of games. There are countless Tetris Clones. Also, most people that arent realgamers havent played the gameboy, yet most people have played a version of tetris.
You're missing the point. The GameBoy and Tetris became icons together, which helped popularize the idea of Tetris sufficiently for it to become the most popular game of all time. After the GameBoy, we started to see specialized handhelds that played nothing but Tetris. This was 20 years ago, just in case you're lacking the necessary perspectival distance.
Certainly Tetris became so incredibly popular due to the GameBoy (and vice versa), but that isn't the only element involved. Tetris is a very special game on any system, in a way that, say, Columns never was. I've seen two people compelled by Tetris that didn't realise the object was to complete lines. They thought the goal was to build a big wall without destroying any by making a line.
I can't quite explain that, but it's obviously a powerful game on some level. I do know that it is extremely finely tuned: Pajitnov spent a long time testing out possibilities, and although there are variant versions, anything that deviates from the seven tetronimoes and and a pit ten squares wide by twenty deep isn't really compelling.
