Like many kids who grew up in the 80s, I first encountered Tetris via Brick Game, a cheap China-made handheld console that ran a clone version of Tetris. It was all the rage then, everyone in school was playing it, even the parents. In those innocent, pre-internet days, I had no idea what even was a tetromino. All I knew was that earworm of a soundtrack and that hypnotic trance one gets into when playing the game for too long.
It was not till I was a young adult that I was properly exposed to a real Tetris game — Tetris DS on the Nintendo DS. That was when I learnt about T-spins — rotate a T-shaped tetromino to clear lines — and competitive multiplayer Tetris. It was my Tetris coming-of-age, even if I was never more than an average player.
Unfortunately, Tetris DS isn’t one of the Tetris games included in Tetris Forever, a new collection of Tetris games from before 2000, including some of the more obscure versions. Released to commemorate the upcoming 40th anni…
