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3rd NES Tetris


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Mmm BPS Tetris, absolutely terrible compared to Tengen and Nintendo's takes.  Music is a bit annoying as are the sound effects, controls aren't bad, but the way the controls work are not friendly compared to the other two.  I don't recall it having any options to really configure either, just a bare bones terrible version against the other two.

I'll take the modern 4th Tetris on the NOAC that Basic Fun used on their tabletop Tetris cabinet, that one is fun.

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Yes, BPS Tetris was probably among the first ones, taking the original Russian PDP/DOS control scheme and adopting it for a hand controller. It would seem like it was Nintendo and/or Tengen who rethought how the game should be controlled and changed the controls instead of just implementing like the others already did. The home computer versions from Mirrorsoft kind of plays like e.g. Nintendo's version except it retains the hard drop.

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Yes. You can see this with the "Original" MS-DOS version programmed by Vadim Gerasimov (and for International version, featuring the Elorg copyright) the control scheme is quite awkward, tho it's probably meant to work on a variety of not very standardized computer layout (probably more common in USSR than in the West; to have non-standard keyboard I mean).

You can read about it on Gerasimov's own site and download the MS-DOS version too : https://vadim.oversigma.com/Tetris.htm

 

Tetris_(IBM_PC)_Title_Screen.png

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Earlier this year, I played a homebrew Tetris on the Sord M5. I believe it also copied the early controller scheme. Exactly who was first out of Mirrorsoft, Nintendo or Tengen I haven't looked up and perhaps there is a common denominator there about who exported the game from Soviet Union and refined it. Same goes for various scoring schemes, how points are calculated and if you should get bonus for getting a Tetris (i.e. using a vertical straight four to remove four lines at once) or not.

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From what I recall, the reason why there are different Tetris and why there were infight over the copyright is that Tetris leaked out of the Soviet Union from two ways :

The first one is the official Elorg-to-Nintendo one we all know, in 1989 for the Game Boy. The second one is from a British game publisher, Andromeda Software, during a visit in Hungary in 1986; they were looking for games, and the Hungarian game publisher Novotrade (later Appaloosa Games) had Tetris in their catalogue. From there, the game was sold to other Western publishers to be developped for IBM PC, ZX Spectrum and other platforms (all of them computers).

The famous copyright battle happened when Tengen acquired the rights to Tetris and ported it to Nintendo consoles, while Nintendo had acquired the exclusive right to consoles...

The problem happening here is that the Novotrade/Andromeda rights were only covering computers; also Andromeda software has started selling the right to Tetris before the contracts with Elorg had been finalized, meaning that the "exclusive to computer" clause may not have been know to Tengen at the time. (the real story is even more complex but you get the general gist)

 

So to answer you Carlsson, Mirrorsoft was probably here before Tengen and Nintendo (If I recall, Mirrorsoft was the European distributor of Tetris after acquiring the licence rights from Andromeda Software).

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That roughly sounds right.  There is a youtube video from the Gaming Historian, about an hour long, it has all the details.  I remember back when the Gamecube came out I got stuck in a lame bundle with EB games to get mine, had to get 2 games, an accessory or two, and since the accessories were crap, one of them was oddly the book Game Over by David Scheff, and he covered the life of Nintendo to that point from the 1880s to present, so it had an entire chapter dedicated to the Tetris debacle and what you said, and what I remember from it and the youtube video lines up fairly well.  Basically tengen bought rights they had NO right to outside of arcade as Nintendo legally only legally sealed the deal on it for home console(handheld falls into it too for Gameboy) sales in the US etc.  The one thing that got wrapped up differently were various home computers, that's where I think mirrorsoft had the rights, so like in the US you saw spectrum holobyte get a chunk as they put out Tetris, Welltris, and I think Hatris too on PC.

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TSR did a nice write up on Tetris, back in the late 90’s: https://www.atarihq.com/tsr/special/tetrishist.html Read it before; just didn’t remember the BPS version. From his description BPS got their license from the same folks who licensed the game to Atari Games; perhaps BPS’s version was illegal too?

From what I can tell, the founder of Mirrorsoft had a daughter who went on to co-found Magellan, an early web directory/search engine. (Archived version looks like a directory to me, but the few mentions of it I can find call it a search engine.)

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