My favorite version as a kid was Tetris Plus. It has a puzzle mode where you get certain configurations that you have to clear. There’s also a chibi archeologist that walks on the puzzle and they can get squished by a spiked ceiling.
The 1992 release of Tetris for the Philips CD-i is not a particularly good version of Tetris in terms of playability, but the music absolutely slaps
In Tetris for the CD-i, pieces can not be soft dropped, only hard dropped using the second button. There is no lock delay; keeping your stack low is to the player’s advantage for survival.
The original licensed release of Tetris on the Macintosh by Spectrum Holobyte in 1988 is one of the most striking and aesthetically lovely original ports of the game.
It’s effectively not really Tetris the same way anymore, but I have a massive soft spot for Tetris 2 (Tetris Flash in Japan) on the SNES. i know people tend to find this one mid or even legit bad, but there’s something about it. the puzzle mode in particular kept me and my family occupied for a long time
Tetris (1989) (colloquially known as Wesleyan Tetris among other nicknames) by Randall Cook for the Macintosh is (I think?) the first “evil” Tetris variant. An absolute classic of Tetris fanworks… the announcer shit-talks you with synthesized speech during play…
A Mac-exclusive bid to create the most vexing Tetris possible. It will lie, cheat, taunt you about your play (“Nice slide!”), give you preposterously unusable pieces, and find a creative “new way to screw you” on every level. While it never saw its intended commercial publication, a leaked development copy became an underground sensation.
This version only refers to itself as Tetris by Randall Cook, but it picked up many other names as it spread: New Tetris, Obnoxious Tetris, Attitude Problem Tetris, Wise-Ass Tetris, Asshole Tetris and most famously Wesleyan Tetris after the author’s university. Recently, Cook announced plans to release the source code under the name Original Supertris.
A Video Game Thing I Think About a Lot are all the modes from Tetris DS. Push Mode especially is one of my favorite head-to-head puzzle game modes. That might actually be my favorite Tetris
Welltris was inspired by another puzzle game titled Blockout (1989). Alexey Pajitnov said he did not like the game, stating that its wireframed blocks only showed the edges and that he “thought a lot about how it could be possible to it myself. I decided to essentially make Welltris a 2D game with real strong sense of 3D by having flat pieces fall down the surface of the walls.”
