It’s almost impossible to list the top 10 video games of all time without mentioning Tetris. It remains as enjoyable today as it was 40 years ago, even if you don’t belong to the Game Boy generation.

Celebrating the four-decade milestone is Tetris Forever, the latest retro game collection from Digital Eclipse. Available now, more than 15 playable classic games from the series’ history are featured, including many being released for the first time outside Japan. You can battle your friends in the multiplayer favourite Tetris Battle Gaiden, create explosions to clear lines in Super Bombliss, and see where it all began in 1984 with an accurate recreation of the first version of Tetris on the Electronika 60 computer.

Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov and The Tetris Company founder Henk Rogers (right)

Plus, there is a 90-minute documentary exploring the friendship and creative partnership between Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov and The Tetris Company founder Henk Rogers.

The story of the game

The story of the original Tetris and the Cold War go hand in hand. Pajitnov designed Tetris in 1984 while working for the old Soviet Academy of Science in Moscow. The game had the potential to become a success globally. In the USSR, some considered it a waste of time. People like Pajitnov weren’t allowed by the state to sell games, so any deal that was done benefitted the country and ELORG (a state-owned organisation with a monopoly on the import and export of computer hardware and software in the USSR) to a certain degree.

As a child, Pajitnov was busy with card and board games like Russian bridge and Nim, and loved collections of puzzles and riddles available in Soviet libraries. His life changed when he came across books by the mathematicians Martin Gardner and Henry Dudeney.

Tetris was an exception creation. Not since Pong in the 1970s a video game made a bigger impact. It became not just the top-selling game for personal computers in the ’80s, the Tetris effect was felt in arcades and the then-new category of gaming device, the hand-held Game Boy. Tetris continues to be played in some form or the other.

Helping leave Tetris the Iron Curtain was Henk Rogers, who back then was leading a happy life in Japan with his wife and children while designing video games. At a game expo, he came across the game and thought it was a perfect fit for Nintendo Game Boy. He put up his house to take out a loan to get deals in place until he realised the murky story around the game’s rights.

The original Tetris

Henk visited the Soviet Union on a tourist visa to conduct business with ELORG. The old USSR was dying and corruption was in every corner. Ultimately he and Pajitnov became friends because of their shared love for BASIC computer programming language and also Pascal.

Henk ultimately completed the deal with Nintendo, got his house back, and became a millionaire. He helped Pajitnov and his family immigrate to the US in 1991, and they remained best friends.

Another part of Pajitnov’s life that’s not often discussed was his time working for Microsoft for nine years since 1996. He brought together a team to remix the puzzle types and create new ones. Microsoft released games by Pajitnov, including the match-three puzzle series Hexic.

Down the years

What makes the collection interesting is an unofficial Game Boy version that plays like the original, even if it doesn’t have the actual Nintendo license. The new version of Tetris Time Warp is also quite good and though it starts out looking sleek, every so often it takes you back in time briefly, reskinning the game to look like one of the many older variants. You will also find Tetris Battle Gaiden enjoyable; it’s a multiplayer offering that is much loved in the Tetris community.

Of course, at the heart of the collection is a recreation of the original Tetris, back when it ran on the Electronika 60 and the blocks were made from brackets. You will see why people fell in love with the game back then.

Earlier, the difficulty was finding the correct hardware to play the pop culture cornerstone. Tetris Forever solves that.