Free Tetris

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to my blog for all things Tetris. Join me, as I venture through twenty-five years worth of pop cultural capital in search for the rarest, most elusive, most memorable, or the best available of the Tetris specimen.

And where better to start than with the very first result from Google for my search for "tetris" this evening: Free Tetris.

Free Tetris, one of hundreds, probably thousands of free flash Tetris variants available on the vast lands of the Internets. It will serve well as an example of how a very simple game design turns out to be perhaps not so simple as concieved.


At first glance, everything seems as it should be. We have ten columns in the glass, the usual seven types of tetrominos, merrily colored for our pleasure. We move the tetrominos with the arrow keys, and even enjoy the luxory of a pause button (the p or the n key). There is a "soft drop", which means that we by pressing the down key can accelerate the pace of the tetramino's progress downward. The upcoming tetromino is shown plain and clear. Every ten cleared lines, the game proceeds to the next level. We also get to choose any level from one to ten to start from at the "title screen".

A few common features are missing. This is common, no variant has it all. Here will we have to manage without the "hard drop" (the drop directly to the bottom from the tetromino's present position), we have no statistics for the tetrominoes, and it is not possible to toggle the "preview window" on and off. Neither do we have any form of high score list. These features being missing are not any serious matter. Indeed, what we have here seems to be a perfectly fine specimen.

But that is not exactly the case.

In most Tetris variants, the controls reset when a tetromino is fixed at the bottom of the glass. This means, that if we drop a tetromino by pressing the down key, the soft drop will only apply for the tetromino that we are presently controlling. In Free Tetris, this is not the case. The instant we soft drop a tetromino to the bottom, the next tetromino shows up at the top of the glass, and is instantly affected by the down key, which we have not yet released. At a minimum, the new tetromino has dropped two or three lines before we have released the key. Annoying at level one. Disastrous at level six.

Despite this fault, which is a serious but not fatal one, it should be clear that Free Tetris has a winning hand in many situations. It is Tetris. And it is free. End of debate. There are hundreds of other variants to find for anyone not satisfied. However, since Free Tetris is, after all, the top Google search result for "tetris", one cannot help but wish that this tiny, but so great, error would have been mended.