Tetris - The 10th Best Game Ever Made

Even after the human race has gotten bored of Beethoven, sick of Shakespeare and tired of Tolstoy, Tetris will endure. As much as that’s hyperbolic (and a mediocre demonstration of GCSE-level alliteration), the simplicity and universal appeal of the Tetris concept makes it practically unimaginable that its charm will ever fade. This is a game that taps into a primordial human desire to sort, categorise and arrange; and as a result is incapable of becoming boring.

Did anyone ever need the rules of Tetris explained to them? No. The game starts, a 4-piece block (or tetromino) inches from the top toward the bottom of the screen, and in the three or four seconds it takes to get there, the game has all the time it needs to complete its tutorial. No-one needs to be told that the blocks should be stacked as tidily as possible- human instinct takes care of that.

Porn for mathematicians

Of course, human instinct also gets a kick out of the way the game forces you to balance risk against reward. As anyone who’s broken the 999,999 score barrier would surely tell you, the ideal is to always remove four lines at once using a Tetris block, as it scores 30 times more points than removing a single line. Yet this also makes you dependent on one type of block, encouraging you to build higher and higher, and putting you in serious danger should the valuable Tetris piece takes its sweet time to arrive (which inevitably it will).

Porn for videogame players

It’s the Gameboy version of Tetris that I’ve singled out for particular credit here. Not just because Nintendo astutely realised that Tetris is a perfect game to play on the move, but for the more significant reason that it spread the joy of the two-player mode to a world-wide audience. If the third pillar of “what human instinct is about” is “screwing each other over” (and let’s face it, there’s plenty of evidence that’s the case), then a two-player Tetris game seems to have been designed to satisfy all your most fundamental needs. There are few things more satisfying than hearing the “cling cling badow!” that accompanies the removal of four lines at once, followed seconds later by an “Argh!” from your opponent as they receive your lines at the bottom of their screen.

Tetris is videogame design at its purest, most restrained, and perhaps most elegant, living up to old the maxim that (almost) every great game embodies: “simple to play, impossible to master ”. It’s probably the least controversial pick on this list, because everyone’s played it, and everyone loves it; and in fact, the controversial thing is probably that it’s not higher up. I don’t care. I’ve chosen the arbitrary order in which to rank all these very different games, and I’m sticking to it.