Another week, another hour or two of people filling your ears with discussion of old video games. Hello!
This entry is one of those Extremely Big Topics, and it's one that I can't believe we haven't tackled yet! Ever! In the nearly 12 years we've been making Retronauts! I guess some topics are so vast that you end up overlooking them in one of those forest-for-the-trees scenarios. Tetris might be the single most played video game in human history, and with its ubiquity comes a story as convoluted as it is enormous. So convoluted, in fact, that despite the huge amount of research that went into this episode, Frank and I still came armed with contradictory info about a number of specifics…
We recorded this episode last year (in December), which means it's (1) the final piece of 2017 content in our advance production pipeline, and (2) we recorded it before The Game Historian's History of Tetris video, which helps lock down some of these anecdotal uncertainties. Ah well, I kind of like the "wait, are you sure?" feel of this episode. It really speaks to the nature of the unique place in history that gave us Tetris. And that's cool.
Retronauts Episode 148
Tetris
MP3, 44.0 MB | 1:33:56
Direct download | Retronauts on iTunes | Retronauts at PodcastOne
Episode description: Steve Lin and Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation join Jeremy and Bob to comb through the convoluted story of one of the most popular and addictive video games of all time: Tetris!
The music here, of course, is from Tetris for NES and Game Boy, as well as Tetris 2. Now, go buy yourself a copy of Tetris Battle Gaiden while it's still cheap!
Also, it's not really clear, but the cover illustration is a riff on the vintage 007 From Russia With Love poster, with Alexey Pajitnov in Bond's place and Henk Rogers replacing one of the sexy Bond girls. Sorry, the artwork I can create with these miserable hands God gave me is limited at best.