It figures that I finally remove Planet Gamecube from my bookmarks, and it’s at that time that they choose to put up their most interesting piece of content in nearly a year.
Jonathan Metts recently had a chance to interview Henk Rogers, president and CEO of Blue Planet Software and founder of The Tetris Company (“TTC”), the company which handles all licensing of the Tetris name and fundamental design. TTC formed in 1996, which means that all “official” versions of Tetris which appeared after its inception were regulated by TTC and its guidelines. This includes Tetris DX, Tetrisphere, Tetris Worlds, and the recent Tetris DS, among many, many others. Below, Rogers discusses licensing the famous franchise:
We choose partners that we think can move the IP forward, in other words make Tetris a better game. So we have two kinds of licenses: ones that makes us money, and one that helps move Tetris forward, and Nintendo is one that actually does both. On the ones where the licensee is just in it for the money, we tell them what to do. We have a minimum bar that we create every year, called the Tetris Guideline, and that guideline is the minimum spec for which someone has to create Tetris.
To be sure, there are problems with IP’s like Tetris; for the most part, officially licensed Tetris games have been no more than near-direct copies of the original idea, with more eye candy and perhaps a peripheral mode or feature here or there. Then again, look at Tetris DS, which boasts a variety of new concepts built on the absolute minimum of constants: the seven tetrominoes.
I suppose Tetris is fun to think about in a design sense, because of its utter simplicity and massive popularity. Let’s face it, “falling-piece” puzzle games are a dime-a-dozen these days. Tetris distinguishes itself from the pack because of its use of tetrominoes, instead of bubbles, or blobs, or pills, or whatever. But what if Tetris hadn’t been based around the concept of falling blocks? How else could Tetris have worked, and did it shift the paradigm?
Also, on the topic of Tetris, I thought this was pretty cool. Same thing happens with DDR arrows, and I just heard someone in a podcast discussing a similar effect occurring after long rounds of Geometry Wars.
Tetris from the Top: An Interview with Henk Rogers via Kotaku.