Fifteen Years On, Who Would Publish Tetris?

One must wonder , if Tetris were created today, what publisher would be willing to publish it. Originally Tetris was sold as the game from Russia and featured art and music of a similar nature, almost as a gesture to our new friends in what was then the U.S.S.R. Had Tetris been dreamed up by a kid in a garage in Iowa one wonders if it ever would have been published at all. (One would like to be optimistic and think that he would have been able to code it up, release it as shareware or to the casual games market on the Internet, and the game s fame would still have been assured.) Tetris is the ultimate in low-technology gameplay, and many game publishers simply refuse to publish games that do not utilize the latest in computer graphics wizardry. After all, where will they find the pretty screenshots for the back of the box? The game lacks any sort of story or even setting, another absolute must for the people in marketing. What sort of copy will they write in their ads? Indeed, it is a testament to Tetris s brilliant gameplay that it cannot be adequately described in any amount of words, much less in a catchy one-liner. Even looking at a static screenshot of Tetris is a thoroughly unexciting experience, one which cannot hope to communicate the game s sublime art. Gameplay is an elusive subject for manipulators of the written word; it must be experienced to be understood .