And with a game like Tetris you can introduce time pressure with the falling pieces.

Yes, in this respect, well… Tetris is not a pure puzzle game. It has a very strong arcade element. Usually people don’t put this time pressure on puzzles in terms of the rules, though. Sometimes they put a timer, but usually it’s an option. Pure puzzles require
some time to think.

Hexic doesn’t feature time pressure, at least not in its main mode. Would you say that makes it more of a pure puzzle game than Tetris?

Well, formally maybe yes, but not really. Hexic is a more arcadey game too, because it has too much of a random element in it. A classical puzzle is something with the full information, which is set up once. But those games are random, so that you have variety in the task every time, and you don’t know the configuration. That gives great variety and interest to the game, but at the same time it doesn’t allow you to make the puzzle really deep and complicated. Realtime is one element that ‘washes out’ puzzles, and the other one is this randomness.

What do you think motivates a Tetris player, psychologically speaking?

Well, it’s a very teasing game, you know? Every moment you feel you could do a little bit better, and lower this garbage by one line. And you do it and you discover that you’re higher than before. Also you have a very nice feeling when you fit pieces together, and it comes in a good rhythm.

On that basic level, do you think it works in a similar way psychologically to other genres of game? Shooters, for example.

In some respects. But usually they plan some other emotional picture. They try to increase the challenge, so it starts easy, then you have the first challenge, then you have a stable period, then you increase the challenge again, and then you have a boss, which is the catharsis of this kind of mini-drama. And somehow, intuitively, many game designers discover this dynamic and reproduce it. But Tetris doesn’t have this overall picture. It just happens to be repeatable stuff with a certain rhythm.

As you said, you created Tetris in a spirit of experimentation…

Well, Tetris in particular I did just because I liked to program those games. Other games I did for some experimental reason or other, but Tetris was a pure exercise.

But you created it without thinking commercially. Is that part of the reason it’s so simple, so universal?

No, I didn’t think commercially, that’s for sure. All of my games in that period were created just for fun. But you know, what does commercial mean? I never work on games just for commercial reasons… Actually, that is not true. Sometimes I’m hired to do a game for some specific goal, to go with a new piece of equipment or because they want me in the game for the advertising. But that’s the only way to make a truly commercial game – the requirement for the game to be fun is not very high, and it has another purpose.

But if you work on a game, whether you do it for yourself or you do it as a job, you want people to like it, otherwise it makes no sense. You don’t think about money but about the pleasure you give to people. Commercial is the wrong term. You want to give people pleasure – that’s the only goal.

Are there any other puzzle games that you particularly admire?

Oh, yes. In fact I admire almost all of them. In the early days, there was Lode Runner. I consider it a real puzzle game. That was my favorite for many, many years. It’s such a good combination of dynamic stuff, the finger-work, and real planning and puzzle-solving. Every level was a real puzzle with its own mechanics, its own dynamics, its own kind of solution. At the same time, it was an arcade game to play. This combination was done absolutely right. I can’t imagine any other game with such inventive and unusual design.

Later on, I liked the games published by PopCap and GameHouse – those guys know how to do puzzle games. And for a very long time I really admired Pipe Dream [originally known as Pipe Mania]. That’s the other absolutely classic, classic game. It will never die.