Tetris Forever, last year’s excellent interactive history of the classic block-dropping puzzler, has added two more games plucked from the series’ past as part of its “biggest-ever update”.
Tetris Forever, if you’re unfamiliar, follows the format of developer Digital Eclipse’s previous (and consistently superb) interactive documentary experiences – Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration, Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, and The Making of Karateka – combining archive material, new interviews, and playable games into one fascinating whole.
At launch, it featured 15 games – ranging from a recreation of the original Tetris on Electronika 60 to Digital Eclipse’s new Tetris Time Warp – and additional versions, including Welltris, have been added since then. And now the roster is expanding further, this time adding MS-DOS versions of Spectrum Holobyte’s 1991 Super Tetris and 1988’s Tetris (AcademySoft) v. 3.12.
Super Tetris, Digital Eclipse notes, was an early attempt at creating a Tetris “sequel”, requiring players to earn bombs and clear a Matrix already half full at the start. Tetris (AcademySoft) v. 3.12, meanwhile, is the final version of Tetris created within the Soviet Union, and includes a Phantom mode featuring invisible O-Tetriminos.