Tetris (Tengen unlicensed)
| Tetris | |
|---|---|
_cover.jpg)
North American video game cover. Illustration by Marc Ericksen.
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| Developer(s) | Atari Games |
| Publisher(s) | Tengen |
| Distributor(s) | Atari Games |
| Designer(s) | Ed Logg, Kelly Turner, Norm Avellar |
| Composer(s) | Brad Fuller |
| Series | Tetris |
| Platform(s) | Arcade, Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) |
| Release |
Arcade
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| Genre(s) | Puzzle |
| Mode(s) |
Single-player Multiplayer (up to two players) |
Tetris (styled TETЯIS) is a puzzle game developed by Atari Games and originally released for arcades in 1988. Based on Alexey Pajitnov's Tetris, Atari's version features the same gameplay as the computer editions of the game, as players must stack differently shaped falling blocks to form and eliminate horizontal lines from the playing field. The game features several difficulty levels and two-player simultaneous play.
Atari later ported the game to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and released an unlicensed NES version in 1989 under its Tengen brand. However, there were issues with the title's publishing rights. After much legal wrangling, Nintendo itself ended up with the rights to publish console versions of Tetris, leaving Atari with only the rights to arcade versions. As a result, the Tengen game was only on the shelf for four weeks before Atari was legally required to recall the game and destroy any remaining inventory of its NES version.
Nintendo produced its own version for the Game Boy as well as the NES. Both versions were commercially successful and Nintendo held the Tetris license for many years. With less than 100,000 copies known to exist, the Tengen release has since become a collector's item, due to its short time on the market. Various publications have since noted that Tengen's Tetris was in some ways superior to the official NES release, especially since the Tengen game featured a two-player simultaneous mode not available in Nintendo's game.
In 1988, Soviet Academy of Sciences researcher Alexey Pajitnov alongside Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov developed Tetris out of a desire to create a two-player puzzle game, and the game spread commercially amongst computers. Mirrorsoft president Robert Stein approached Pajitnov with an offer to distribute Tetris worldwide, and secured the rights to license the title, which were in turn granted to Spectrum HoloByte. After seeing the game run on an Atari ST, programmer Ed Logg petitioned Atari Games to license it, and approached Stein. With the rights secured, Atari Games produced an arcade version of Tetris, and under their Tengen brand name began development to port the title to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in May 1989.
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