Title: Tetris

Platform: Game Boy

Year: 1989

Final Vote Percentage: 61.11%

Tetris did not begin life on the Game Boy, but it began the life of the Game Boy. Created in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov, Tetris could be found on a variety of early home computers. It proved quite popular among computer enthusiasts but wouldn’t hit the mainstream until it was licensed to Nintendo as a pack in game with every one of their new handheld game systems, the Game Boy. Tetris and Game Boy were a perfect match and an immediate hit with Nintendo’s customer base, which at the time was just about everyone.

Tetris was the perfect handheld game. On a technical level it was simple. It didn’t require any complex scrolling or fancy graphical tricks. It was easy to see on the Game Boy’s unlit screen (which even for the time was quite rudimentary) because it featured nothing more than a plain white (light green) background and black (dark green) Tetris pieces. Thus, unlike many other Game Boy games, one didn’t have to hold the screen up to the pure unfiltered vigor of the sun in order to make out fine details. But beyond its technical appropriateness, Tetris housed a deep game design benefit that likely no one at the time fully understood.

Obviously Tetris doesn’t have much of a plot, and this benefited its handheld release enormously. It is easy to start and stop playing. You never have to get past a boss to get to a save point or have to write down a password. You’ll never find yourself skipping through dialogue boxes. Tetris is a game in its purest sense as it is nothing but gameplay. This idea of pick up, play, and put down would become a core game design concept for handheld games well beyond Game Boy. It’s clear in the simplest of cell phone apps like Angry Birds, but can also be seen in more complex games like Resident Evil: Revelations on the 3DS. Despite having a rich story and deep gameplay, Resident Evil: Revelations is split up into short chapters that give the player regular opportunities to start or stop.

Tetris would continue to have a rich life on Nintendo systems. It launched twice on the NES as both Atari and Nintendo were pretty sure they had the rights (turns out Nintendo did). Since then Tetris has had a release on nearly every Nintendo system including the Nintendo Switch. It of course can today be found on a variety of platforms including consoles, handhelds, and cell phones, but the everlasting success of Tetris can all be traced back to its release on the Game Boy. Similarly the success of the Game Boy, can be largely credited to Tetris. With that in mind it would be impossible to ignore Tetris and an honored member of the Nintendo World Report Hall of Fame.