Originally portrayed solely in black and white, Broweleit requested that the pieces be portrayed in color, and Logg altered the game accordingly prior to the next Consumer Electronics Show. After presenting the title at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Tengen president Randy Broweleit requested improvements in the game. In an interview, Ed Logg notes that the Tengen version of Tetris was built completely from scratch, using no source code or material from the original game. Atari made use of the same art when advertising the new release, as seen in the Atari inset above right, adding a fireworks motif that was not a part of the original art. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square, Moscow, and featuring at its base a falling stone concept that mirrored the gameplay. The art which was featured on the Tengen cover was an airbrush painting by well known illustrator Marc Ericksen featuring St. As a result, 268,000 Tetris cartridges were recalled and destroyed after only four weeks on shelves. District Court Judge Fern Smith issued an injunction barring Tengen from further distributing the game, and further ordered all existing copies of the game be destroyed. In June 1989, a month after the release of Tengen's Tetris, U.S. In April 1989, Tengen, who had previously filed an anti-trust suit against Nintendo, sued Nintendo again claiming rights to distribute Tetris on the NES, and Nintendo counter-sued citing infringement of trademark. However, because Stein had secured the rights from Pajitnov directly and not from the Russian authorities, the USSR's Ministry of Software and Hardware Export stated that the console rights to Tetris had been licensed to nobody, and that Atari Games had only been licensed the rights to produce arcade games with the property. Around this same time, Nintendo was asked by Bullet-Proof Software with the prospect of developing a version of Tetris for the Game Boy, and Rogers traveled to Moscow to secure permission to distribute Tetris with the Game Boy. Mirrorsoft later sub-licensed the rights to Henk Rogers of Bullet-Proof Software to distribute Tetris in Japan. With the rights secured, Atari Games produced an arcade version of Tetris, and under their Tengen subsidiary began development to port the title to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in June 1988. After seeing the game run on an Atari ST, programmer Ed Logg petitioned Atari Games to license it for an arcade version, and approached Stein. He in turn sub-licensed the rights to Mirrorsoft for the European market and Spectrum HoloByte for the North American market. Andromeda Software executive Robert Stein approached Pajitnov with an offer to distribute Tetris worldwide, and secured the rights to license the title. In 1987, Soviet Academy of Sciences researcher Alexey Pajitnov (who invented the original game in 1984-85) alongside Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov developed a new version of Tetris out of a desire to create a two-player puzzle game. Two players or one player and the computer attempt to form lines in the same playing field, which is wider than usual. Tengen's Tetris for the NES in Cooperative mode. The two-player mode replaces the statistics display with another playfield. Various publications have since noted that Tengen's Tetris was in some ways superior to the official NES release, especially since the Tengen game featured a two-player simultaneous mode not available in Nintendo's version.ĭevelopment and history Tengen's Tetris for the NES in one-player mode. With fewer than 100,000 copies known to exist, the Tengen release has since become a collector's item, due to its short time on the market. Both versions were commercially successful and Nintendo held the Tetris license for many years. Nintendo produced its own version for the NES as well as a version for the Game Boy. As a result, the Tengen game was only on the shelf for four weeks before Atari was legally required to recall the game and destroy any remaining inventory of its NES version. There were also issues with the publishing rights for Tetris, and after much legal wrangling, Nintendo itself ended up with the rights to publish console versions, leaving Atari with only the rights to arcade versions. In 1989, Atari Games released a port of their arcade version under their Tengen label for the Nintendo Entertainment System, despite it not being licensed by Nintendo for the system. The game features several difficulty levels and two-player simultaneous play. Based on Alexey Pajitnov's Tetris, Atari Games' version features the same gameplay as the computer editions of the game, as players must stack differently shaped falling blocks to form and eliminate horizontal lines from the playing field. Tetris (styled TETЯIS) is a puzzle game developed by Atari Games and originally released for arcades in 1988.
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