
It’s wild to think that there’s still so much creativity left in the tank for a franchise as old as this. That’s the reason it’s been around this long.” Any iteration you play, you kind of get hooked into that Tetris zone. It’s a simple game, but it has so much depth. “It’s one of those things where we have an inherent desire to create order out of chaos and it plays into that. “Tetris is the perfect game,” Rogers tells Digital Trends. Tetris brand President and CEO Maya Rogers believes it’s because the game taps into our innate human desire to organize. In thinking about all the little tweaks and innovations to the game over the years, I couldn’t help but wonder why people are still so drawn to Tetris - both players and developers alike. Tetris Beat uses the same idea, but layers on its unique rhythm mechanics to keep players tapping on the beat. Players tap one to select where the next piece will fall, rather than controlling it directly. In that game, “ghost pieces” appear on the board. The game’s Tap mode, for instance, takes cues from EA’s Tetris Blitz, a mobile game that shut down last year. It’s a culmination of decades of ideas, both from other games and the community itself. In chatting with the team, it became clear that Tetris Beat wasn’t created in a vacuum. The idea that he’s probably going to look at this is pretty amazing to me.” Taking cues “I had the first version of Lumines on the PSP, Rez on the Dreamcast, and of course Tetris Effect. “Tetsuya Mizuguchi is one of my heroes,” says Clark.

Clark says that the game, along with Mitzuguchi’s work in the rhythm genre, was another direct point of reference for the team.

#DEMONIC TETRIS BEAT PC#
Initially released as a PS VR game produced by rhythm game legend Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the trippy game has since expanded out to PC and Xbox with a Switch port on the way. Visually, the game shares a lot in common with Tetris Effect. Leaderboards allow players to compete with their friends and try to perfect their ranking on a specific track. Rotating and dropping blocks in time with the music grants more points. Players have the length of the song to rack up as many points as possible. In Tetris Beat’s standard Drop mode, players start by picking a music track, each of which has a specific visual backdrop made in collaboration with the musicians. There’s some amazing videos of people doing it.”Ĭlark’s team took that idea and made a very deliberate kind of game around it. “The game doesn’t reward you for doing that, but people play Tetris 99 where they try to hard drop in time to the beat. “I actually got really into these videos on YouTube of people playing Tetris games intentionally in time to music,” Lawrence tells Digital Trends.
#DEMONIC TETRIS BEAT PRO#
He recalls seeing a modded PAX build of Tetris Effect that allowed a pro player named Green Tea to specifically play along to the beat. More specifically, Clark visualized the idea after seeing how the Tetris community was interacting with music. Executive Producer Lawrence Clark says that quote was a guiding inspiration for the game. The latest game was born out of that experience.

For me, Tetris is some song which you sing inside yourself and can’t stop.” Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov once described the sensation, saying “Playing is a very specific rhythmic and visual pleasure. While Tetris games let players drop pieces freely, there’s often a certain flow state that players can get into, subconsciously pushing them to play along to the music. Tetris Beat twists the tried-and-true tetromino puzzle formula by honing in on the game’s hidden rhythms. Its fresh mechanics are in dialogue with previous Tetris titles, reminding us of how much of the video game industry is built on collaborative iteration. What makes Tetris Beatspecial is the way it continues a game design conversation that’s been going on for decades.
