That Game Boy saved my sanity during what might’ve been the longest car ride in human history. Summer of ’91, I’m crammed in the back of my dad’s Buick with my younger brother Jake for a seventeen-hour drive to visit relatives in Kansas – you know, the kind of family obligation trip where nobody really wants to go but you do it anyway because that’s what families do. We’d been arguing about everything for about six hours straight when Dad pulled into some truck stop near the Colorado-Nebraska border, disappeared into the building, and came back with this gray plastic brick and one game cartridge. “Figure out how to share this or we’re going home,” he announced, tossing it at us like he was throwing raw meat to wild animals.
The game was Tetris, though I didn’t think much of it at first. I mean, it’s just blocks falling down, right? Where are the bad guys? Where’s Mario? What’s the point of stacking geometric shapes when you could be jumping on mushrooms or shooting space invaders? But Jake grabbed it first – being younger apparently gave him dibs – and within about ten minutes he was completely absorbed, muttering things like “come on, give me a straight piece” under his breath. When he finally handed it over, I figured I’d humor him for a few minutes before demanding we stop and buy a real game.
Three hours later, I’m still playing. Completely hooked. There’s something about the way those pieces – tetrominoes, I learned years later, though back then we just called them “the shapes” – fit together that just clicked in my brain. The music, that Russian folk tune that burrows into your skull and never leaves, became the soundtrack to the rest of our drive. Jake and I developed this unspoken rotation system where you played until you died, then passed it over. No arguments, no fighting over whose turn it was. We were united in our quest to beat each other’s high scores.
By the time we hit Kansas, we’d both gotten pretty decent. Jake favored what I now know is called “going for Tetrises” – leaving a well on one side and waiting for that straight piece to clear four lines at once. Risky strategy, especially for a twelve-year-old, but when it worked he’d get this smug look and announce his point total like he’d just won the lottery. Me, I played it safe, keeping everything flat and even. Boring maybe, but I lasted longer. We’d developed our own terminology too – the zigzag pieces were “snakes,” the L-shapes were “corners,” and that T-piece was just “the weird one.”
The Tetris Effect hit me hard that first year, though I didn’t know it had a name back then. I’d close my eyes at night and see falling blocks. I’d organize my school supplies into Tetris-like patterns without thinking about it. During math class, I’d catch myself arranging numbers on my homework into neat rows, trying to make them “clear” like Tetris lines. My mom thought I was having some kind of breakdown when she found me reorganizing the pantry so all the canned goods fit together “more efficiently.” How do you explain to your mother that a video game has rewired your brain to see everything as a spatial puzzle?
College brought the NES version, which felt like playing a completely different game even though it was fundamentally the same. The colors made everything pop more, the controller felt more responsive than those mushy Game Boy buttons, and somehow the whole experience seemed more… official? My roommate Matt had the system, and we’d pass the controller back and forth during study breaks that inevitably turned into three-hour gaming sessions. We analyzed the differences like scholars – how the randomization seemed different, how the piece rotation worked slightly better, how the music sounded fuller through actual speakers instead of that tiny Game Boy beeper.
Found out my Victorian Literature professor played Tetris when I spotted a Game Boy poking out of his briefcase after class one day. Dr. Henderson, this tweedy academic who’d spent the last hour discussing the moral implications in George Eliot novels, was apparently sneaking in Tetris sessions between lectures. When our eyes met over the evidence, there was this moment of mutual recognition – like we’d discovered we were part of the same secret society. “Type A or Type B music?” he asked without missing a beat. “Type A,” I admitted. He shook his head sadly. “You’ll graduate to Type B eventually. Everyone does.”
That conversation sent me down a research rabbit hole during finals week – instead of studying for my economics exam, I spent hours in the computer lab learning about Alexey Pajitnov and how this Soviet programmer created something so perfect that it transcended the Cold War. The fact that the music was based on a Russian folk song called “Korobeiniki” blew my mind. Here was this game that had become part of American culture, and it was built on Russian foundations. There was something poetic about that, though I was probably reading too much into it because I was avoiding studying macroeconomic theory.
After graduation, Tetris became my go-to stress reliever. First apartment in Denver, barely any furniture, but I had a TV and an NES hooked up on day one. After long days learning the construction business from the ground up – and believe me, those first few years were brutal – I’d come home and fire up Tetris for what I told myself would be a quick fifteen-minute session. Next thing I knew, it’s 2 AM and I’ve got a 6 AM start time. The meditative quality of stacking blocks somehow counterbalanced the chaos of figuring out adult life in a new city.
Didn’t realize competitive Tetris was even a thing until around 2010 when I stumbled across tournament videos online. Watching these masters execute moves I’d never even heard of – T-spins, perfect stacking techniques, maintaining speeds that seemed physically impossible – was both inspiring and humbling. I’d been playing this game for twenty years and apparently knew nothing about high-level strategy. Started practicing more deliberately after that, though my forty-something reflexes weren’t exactly going to land me in any championships. Still, improving my technique became a renewed obsession, like learning you’ve been tying your shoes wrong your whole life and suddenly wanting to master the proper method.
Mobile phones brought Tetris back into my daily routine in a big way. Having it available during lunch breaks, waiting for appointments, or those awkward few minutes before meetings start meant I was playing more regularly than I had since college. Different apps had their quirks – some with updated graphics, others with new modes and features – but the core remained beautifully unchanged. How many games from 1984 are still perfectly playable today without any modifications needed? It’s like chess or checkers – the design was so fundamentally sound that it doesn’t need updating.
My daughter discovered Tetris the same way I did, though with considerably less sibling rivalry involved. I may have accidentally left Tetris Effect running on the Switch one afternoon when she was about eight, stepping away to grab a beer while leaving the controller conspicuously available. She took the bait immediately, and within minutes had that same focused concentration I recognized from looking in mirrors during my own Tetris sessions. Now she beats my scores regularly, which is both proud-dad satisfying and mildly embarrassing. The torch has been passed, though she plays with techniques I never learned and strategies I don’t fully understand.
The pandemic years saw my Tetris playing reach levels I hadn’t hit since those college all-nighters. With construction work slowed down and suddenly finding myself with more home time than I’d had in decades, those familiar falling blocks became a form of stress management. My phone’s screen time reports were somewhat alarming – apparently I was averaging over two hours daily on various Tetris apps – but as coping mechanisms go, organizing geometric shapes seemed healthier than alternatives I could’ve chosen. During video calls with old friends from work, I discovered several of them had also returned to Tetris during lockdown. Comfort gaming, we called it.
These days, the competition is mostly with myself. Can I still hit the scores I managed last year? Can I execute that T-spin technique I’ve been practicing? My reflexes aren’t what they were at twenty-five, but pattern recognition has improved with experience. It’s a different kind of challenge now – less about raw speed, more about efficiency and planning ahead. The game has evolved with me, or maybe I’ve evolved with it. Either way, we’re still compatible after all these years.
People who don’t game sometimes ask what keeps me coming back to something so simple. “It’s just falling blocks, right? For thirty years?” And yeah, put that way it sounds ridiculous. But there’s an elegance to Tetris that’s hard to explain if you haven’t experienced it. It’s perfectly balanced – easy enough to learn in minutes, impossible to truly master completely. The satisfaction of a well-executed sequence, the flow state when your hands and brain sync up and bypass conscious thought, that moment when four lines clear simultaneously and you get that brief dopamine hit… it’s gaming distilled to its purest form.
Still doodle Tetris pieces during boring meetings, which probably says something about my attention span but whatever. Last month during a particularly tedious safety briefing, I caught myself sketching out piece sequences in my notebook margins. The guy next to me glanced over, smiled, and whispered “Tetris?” When I nodded, he showed me his own doodles – perfectly drawn tetrominoes arranged into clearing patterns. That small moment of connection over this simple game somehow made the whole meeting bearable. Tetris has become more than entertainment for a lot of us – it’s a shared cultural language.
Will I still be playing in another thirty years? Assuming my fingers still work and my eyes can still track falling objects, probably. The platform might change – maybe virtual reality, maybe some neural interface nonsense, maybe something we can’t even imagine yet. But those seven shapes will still be falling, still need organizing, still provide that perfect balance of order and chaos that’s kept me hooked since that summer road trip to Kansas. In a world that keeps getting more complicated, there’s something reassuring about Tetris staying exactly the same. Seven pieces, clear the lines, don’t let it reach the top. Simple rules, endless possibilities. That’s been enough for three decades, and it’ll be enough for three more.
Timothy discovered retro gaming at forty and never looked back. A construction foreman by day and collector by night, he writes from a fresh, nostalgia-free angle—exploring classic games with adult curiosity, honest takes, and zero childhood bias.
