If you’re a die-hard Tetrimono fan who takes Tetris playing seriously, then you’ll know all about the Tetris: The Grandmaster Series. These games are for the quick of hand, those with Hawkeye vision, the grand masters… though I suppose you already got that clue from the title. Now, after first being announced in 2009, Tetris: The Grandmaster 4 – Absolute Eye is heading to Steam in March.
Absolute Eye is technically the 4th Grand Master game (there’s an Xbox-only game called Tetris: The Grand Master Ace that only ever released in Japan), but it’s been more ‘on and off’ than the characters in Friends. Akira announced it in 2009 4 years after The Grand Master 3 released, but the company’s Vice President Ichiro Mihara cancelled the project a year later. He teased it again 6 years later in 2015 and again in September 2024, with The Tetris Company finally confirming that they and Akira had sealed the deal on a new Grand Master Title the same month. All in all, it’s been a long time coming, and now The Absolute Eye is set for release on PC in March 2025, reportedly on the 31st.
テトリスカンパニー社のヘンクさんが来社され、
— tgm_series (@tgm_series) December 3, 2024
弊社三原と平嶋と今後のテトリスに関してディスカッションを行いました。
素晴らしい時間を過ごせたことをとても嬉しく思います。
ここで正式にタイトル名を
「TETRIS THE GRANDMASTER4 – ABSOLUTE EYE -」
と発表させていただきます。… pic.twitter.com/QK9kqNeNzu
The news came earlier this month on Twitter Post from the official The Grand Master X Page with a picture showing the team and Tetris Company’s Henk Rogers smiling excitedly. The fact that this was supposed to be an arcade-only title back running on the Sega RingWide hardware in 2009 would have made it a little problematic for Tetris fans to play on demand. At least we can play it at home with a cup of tea without having to find an arcade and a pocket full of coins and wait for a machine to be free… or having to travel to Japan, which I guess is the most problematic part for me.
If you’re unsure as to how difficult the Grand Master games are, then just take a look at the titles. The third game is called ‘The Terror Instinct’, for crying out loud! With ‘The Absolute Eye’ now joining the fray, it sounds like you’ll need to be Sauron and wield The One Ring to succeed in these games. And with Instant Gravity pieces appearing at the bottom of your screen and tetrimonoes dropping at 3 per second, it’s certainly not something you play to relax.
The fact that a cancelled game is arriving 15 years after it was first announced and being made available worldwide is another win for the retro gaming community as a whole, and while I will undoubtedly be terrible at The Absolute Eye, I’ll definitely give it a go and see how far I get. If you have the Grand Master grade from any of the Tetris GM games so far, then let us know in the comments!
