Format: Flash
Developer: Tetris Online, Inc.
www.tetrisfriends.com

This column wasn’t meant to be about Tetris, as it happens, but the fact that it is should hardly surprise me. After all, my life between the years 1990 and 1996 wasn’t meant to be about Tetris either, and I didn’t manage to successfully dodge that one. I was planning to write about Booyah, an odd little iPhone App that, loosely stated, allows you to exchange your real-world activities for 360-like achievements, but, with the launch of Tetris Friends, an online platform where players can explore a handful of different block-dropping variants, I’m starting to seriously wonder if I ever will have any more real-world activities to try it out on.

Everyone knows the story of Tetris, but it’s always worth going over again: how it was born in Moscow’s Dorodnicyn Computing Centre, and how its almost pathologically gentle creator Alexey Pajitnov found himself stuck in the middle of an unprecedented bidding war as capitalism scrambled to get its hands on the most Soviet of games. With Robert Maxwell and Howard Lincoln on one side, and the unblinking face of Communist bureaucracy on the other, it’s a uniquely omni-allegorical story, capable of being viewed through the separate lenses of everything from geopolitics, morality, and Marxist theory. If anything, the game itself is even more open to interpretation, regularly – and entertainingly – read as a Sisyphean metaphor for the meaningless of exertion, an analogy for mental illness, and a bitter indictment of a failing socialist system in which successes routinely evaporate, and all you’re left with is your failures.

In amongst the semiotic squabbling is the quiet understanding that the perfect game was born perfect – that it leapt into the world fully-formed, and will continue in that fixed and immutable shape until we’re playing it on the day the Multiverse tugs itself into cold, dead fragments. Sure, there have been strange mutations – low-brow online japes like Sextris, and brainy, befuddling developments such as the N64’s secretly brilliant Tetrisphere, but Tetris itself is now as it ever was.

That’s not entirely true, actually. Nestled within the generous options of Tetris Friends, you’ll find Tetris 1989, a mode that ushers you back to the grey-green glory of the GameBoy build. And the most noticeable element of the classic version is the things that aren’t included: the duo of tweaks - still hotly contested, but now essentially made canon - of the Hold button and infinite spin. Like house rules in Monopoly, you’ll probably struggle to find any two people who agree precisely on whether these additions are excellent or execrable – for what it’s worth, I tend to think Hold adds a welcome new layer of tactics to the lurker’s game, while infinite spin is the last refuge of depraved scoundrels – but over the years, and particularly since the brutally effective release of Tetris DS, they’ve been part of the block-dropper’s landscape for everyone who ever moved beyond the classic handheld pack-in. (And, perhaps more tellingly, almost all of the game modes available on Tetris Friends now have ending conditions quietly tacked on – either a concession to groaning servers and versus modes, or a sign that the existential brick build-up of the traditional game has grown unpopular.)

Tetris, then, has come a surprisingly long way, and as much as Tetris Friends is a shrine, it’s also a beautiful, bustling, day-glo laboratory, offering frantic additions like multiplayer Sprints and Battles, and game types weaponised with adverts (providing a jolt of historical irony), such as an irritatingly enjoyable mode cluttered with art assets from DreamWorks’ Ice Age franchise. The big idea, perhaps, is to render the most insular and isolating of puzzle games sociable, crushing you in alongside five other players, competing on leaderboards, and pitching you head-to-head in abstract duels.

If any game could evolve to accommodate such a range of different designs, it’s this one, of course. Its falling blocks speak the universal language of the calamity that only you can avert, and, decades after its release, its appeal shows no signs of losing its freshness, while its aesthetic, if anything, seems increasingly contemporary. Whether you hold, whether you spin, and whether you want your game shot through with DreamWorks acorns, you’ll play anyway. You’ll play because you always have, because you could never resist – you’ll play because, on some worrying level, it was something you were born to do.