On Games Gone By 1: Tetris (Windows 3.1)

Many video game reviewers go out of their way to emphasize their personal connections to the games of their childhood, and to review games they remember fondly to see how they hold up. While I don't have a whole lot of fond memories of classic games from when I was a kid, I might as well start with a game I do remember well.

The version of Tetris that came with the Microsoft Entertainment Pack is my childhood Tetris. It's the version I learned to play on, and the one I'd occasionally catch my parents playing after my bedtime, and it's the one I always wish I had when I get frustrated with the controls on mobile ports. Of course, now that the Internet Archive has a collection of Windows 3.1 games, I can play it in a Windows 3.1 emulator in DOSbox.

Basic keyboard controls: left and right to move pieces, up to rotate, and down to drop a piece to the bottom and lock it in place. In multiplayer, one player uses the arrow keys and the other uses JKL and the spacebar. The game can be paused and unpaused by pressing P. There are ten levels, and beating each level requires you to clear five more lines than the last one.

It's missing some of the quality-of-life features of later Tetris releases: there's no soft-drop, you can only rotate pieces in one direction, you can't swap out pieces for later use, and you can't hold down an arrow key to make a piece move more than one space left or right at a time, which leads to a lot of button-mashing.

But it does have the option to show what piece is coming up next, and it has a feature that I've been disappointed not to find in most later Tetrises: the option to start with a specified number of partly-filled rows on the board. This not only gives the player more control over the difficulty, but also makes the game feel more like a puzzle at the beginning, instead of simply being a test of dexterity.

The two-player mode is a lower-speed precursor to Tetris Battle games. One player can, by clearing multiple lines at a time, send extra lines to the other player to deal with. (This can be turned off in the Options menu.) The level progression keeps pace with the faster player, which can make it harder for a player who falls behind to catch back up. (This cannot be turned off.)

Accessibility note: This version of Tetris has brightly-colored and visually busy backgrounds that change after each level, and there isn't an easy way to change the backgrounds or import new ones. The movement of the pieces is also not smooth, especially at higher speeds. If you are photosensitive or prone to headaches, this is probably not a game you will enjoy. The flickering is even worse in the Internet Archive browser version, so if you do want to play it, I recommend downloading it and setting it up in DOSBox.

With the exception of the loud backgrounds, this is Tetris at its most basic and least confusing. It doesn't have microtransactions, powerups, or countdown timers, and it doesn't rank you relative to other players unless you choose to save your high scores with your name on them. Your only goal is to play for as long as you can keep the game going, and even then it's easy enough to pause in between levels to take a break.

This is my favorite version of Tetris, though I wouldn't mind less button mashing. I don't just love it  because it's the version I grew up with. It's simple and clean, has almost no gimmicks, and feels more like puzzle-solving than a lot of speed-based puzzle games.

Rating: I would play this until my arthritis begged for mercy.