Tetris (Atari Games)

Tetris (stylized as TETЯIS) is a puzzle video game developed by Atari Games and originally released for arcades in February 1989. It is based on Alexey Pajitnov's 1985 Tetris, and has the same gameplay as the computer editions. Players must stack differently shaped falling blocks to form and eliminate horizontal lines from the playing field. It has several difficulty levels and two-player simultaneous play. In May 1989, a conversion of the arcade version was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System under Atari's Tengen brand, which was not licensed by Nintendo. Issues arose with the publishing rights for Tetris, and after much legal wrangling, Nintendo gained the exclusive rights to publish console versions, leaving Atari with only the rights to arcade versions. As a result, the Tengen game was at retail for only four weeks, with fewer than 100,000 copies sold, until Atari was legally required to recall and destroy any remaining inventory of its NES version. Nintendo produced its own version of Tetris for the NES and Tetris for the handheld Game Boy. Both versions were commercially successful, and Nintendo held the Tetris license for many years. The Tengen release has since become a collector's item due to its scarcity. Various publications have since described Tengen's versions as superior in some ways to Nintendo's official NES release, especially for its two-player simultaneous mode.