We’ve all started working on a project that hasn’t ended up seeing the light of day. For some of us, it might be building a garden shed or working on a passion project, while for others, it might be completing a game that we’ve been playing for years but not quite managed to crack.
For Alexey Pajitnov and Vedran Klanac, however, that project was a new version of Tetris that vanished into the ether.
We’ve all seen the Tetris movie, experienced the thrills and spills of a bona fide ‘blockbuster’, and then rushed back to grab our DMGs to try and slot those iconic shapes together and get rid of as many lines as possible.
And it turns out that the little twist that we get at the end of film credits these days was to come a little while later at the Game Developers Conference, when Pajitnov and Klanac would sit down and chat about the once-lost game ‘Tetris Revisited’ in person.
I say ‘once lost’; unbeknownst to Pajitnov, Klanac still had a prototype copy of the game, a fact that he was not to know as according to Venture Beat, he and Klanac hadn’t actually corresponded directly while working on the game, speaking through intermediate parties instead.
But what is this new version of Tetris, and how does it work?
Tetris Reversed – Tetris For Experts
According to Pajitnov “When you see the gameplay video, and when you look at the design elements, this is Tetris for like 300 IQ people.”
At first glance, the game screen looks very similar and has a lot of the same concepts as the original classic we all know and love. The Tetris pieces (aka tetramino for those in the know) fall down from top to bottom, and the player has to fit them together.
Still, things get very complicated from there on out, with reverse mechanics allowing players to ‘reverse the board’ and flip light and dark cells, creating embedded obstacles for players to avoid.
Essentially, pieces falling become pieces in stasis, and closed-off space becomes open space.
And, although you only have a limited number of reverses to use, if a piece reaches the bottom of the play area and isn’t manually placed, the playfield automatically reverses.
Yes, that sounds like an absolute nightmare to me, and I fully believe Pajitnov when he says that you need the kind of brain with supercomputer IQ to get through this game. It looks insanely hard and about as relaxing as completing a Sudoku while hanging upside down over an alligator pit.
Of course, for Tetris heads, this news is going to be like every birthday they’ve ever had coming at once. The fact that something Pajitnov and Klanac worked on 11 years ago has come to light, a real slice of Tetris history, is surely going to make people ask one question – when and where can we play Tetris Reversed?
As of yet, there are no plans to bring this game to fruition. Still, if this new version of Tetris comes to light, I would love to see Blue Scuti having a crack at it to see how quickly they could complete it!
