Tetris Forever Review (Icy)
There's a lot of ire regarding the actual Tetris games included with this collection, and perhaps there is a failure of marketing and messaging with the release of Tetris Forever. But there's nothing in the way of deceit or masquerading here: it does what it explicitly says it's going to do by being an attempt at celebrating Tetris by telling its story as a piece of culture and modern history. And for that, it does a pretty decent job of it. As someone who is only loosely familiar with the general story of how Tetris came to the West, this really had a lot of fascinating footage and storytelling including Rogers's footage from his trips to the Soviet Union and Nintendo of America as well as how Rogers ended up being an approved Nintendo publisher for the Famicom. I don't know what details or footage in all of this is new to the world, and frankly I do not care if any of it is.
There are probably a few flaws with Tetris Forever as a documentary product of sorts, with perhaps the biggest one being that it perhaps doesn't go far enough in talking about the reach of Tetris and in particular the communities that still champion this series today. There are mentions like that of course, with entries on the Classic Tetris World Championship and Blue Scuti's accomplishment, but they're brief and arguably would be better serviced by a little more elaboration on what they really mean for Tetris. After all, those sorts of things are likely the biggest parts of what keeps Tetris in the modern conversation whether it's among gaming communities such as viewers of Awesome Games Done Quick having their minds blown by someone showing off The Grand Master games, or national publications covering a teen beating the NES Tetris. Another flaw might just be that beyond the actual history of it all, the parts that cover the Tetris Company feel a bit too sanitized and hype up the company and brand a little too much. Perhaps that's something inherent to these sorts of products that are made in conjunction with their subjects and are technically licensed from them as well, but perhaps a few industry veterans or community figures (those in game dev/publishing, the games press, or the various Tetris communities) would have been great to hear from.
Then there are the games themselves, which are mostly fine. I'm not really here for every release of Tetris imaginable, and I was never going to play them all at length. Most of all, I don't have unrealistic expectations of what they would be able to get for this compilation of Tetris titles. The included titles generally play well - I did notice slowdown for a couple of them, particularly in Time Warp - and do a decent job of showing off the progression of Tetris releases. Time Warp is a very neat idea that does ultimately suffer from the lack of variety in the included library, however.
A conversation regarding Tetris Forever's "value" as a product is difficult to have in 2024 or 2025. A lot of people seem to expect that they need to receive more included games, especially considering that most of them are "old", without really taking into account the possible difficulties in licensing games to be included, implementing those games, maintaining the overall package, the archival and documentary-related work, etc. And in general, media is repeatedly being undervalued while people's disposable incomes shrink, so it's hard to blame someone for wanting the most bang for their buck. But it's hard to ignore the work put into celebrating Tetris and chronicling its history complete with the ability to play some of the very games described.