The New Tetris was a puzzle game released for the Nintendo 64 in 1999 by Nintendo of America. It was the second title developed by H2O Entertainment and produced in conjunction with Blue Planet Software, owners of the Tetris licence. My role on the project was Art Director and Lead Artist, as well as occasional Producer (although not credited).
Who hasn’t played Tetris? It is one of the most popular video games in history. So when I was given the task to help remake a classic version of the game, I was very excited for the challenge of working with something so many people love and enjoy. The project also gave me the opportunity to live and work in San Francisco.
The new logo for Tetris from that time had been just recently done by artist Roger Dean, commissioned by Blue Planet.
Fresh off the success of Tetrisphere, Nintendo asked H2O to develop a new Tetris title for the N64. A new twist this time around would be that Blue Planet would be involved and helping guide game play design, and that we would work on the game from their offices in San Francisco. Five of us moved there from Calgary in February 1998 for the year it would take to build the game.
In addition to leading the art team, I also set up the H2O section of the Blue Planet offices (phones, etc) and dealt with a lot of the paperwork for moving and visas.
Henk Rogers took an active role in helping develop the game play, and introduced us to Tetris creator, Alexey Pajitnov.
Originally the game was also to be released for the 64DD, Nintendo 64’s expansion disk drive, but halfway through development Nintendo decided to only focus on the main cartridge game.
As part of my research for the project, I dug up screens of Tetris from versions past. I found that other than the Tetraminos (blocks), there isn’t really a lot of visual consistency across the releases.
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| 1986 Mirrorsoft C64 | 1987 IBM PC | 1989 Nintendo Gameboy | 1992 Spectrum Holobyte PC |
It was the less-visually refined Gameboy release which was one of the most popular releases up till that time. If you would like an interesting read through pre-Nintendo Tetris history, try this article. Also Mobygames has a great collection of info on Tetris game variants. Colin Fahey maintains a pretty in depth study of Tetris A.I. and links to the history of Tetris.
The New Tetris was to be the first of a next generation of titles which would carry the franchise into the 21st century. The publishers wanted to have a high quality game with visuals worthy of the new N64 platform, and I wanted to really give the franchise a facelift.
One of the ideas I wanted to try was to bring the unused parts of the play field to life. Most versions of Tetris were played upon static bitmap paintings. If the play field could animate it would be more than just a subliminal backdrop, and perhaps it could even involve itself in gameplay. For instance, perhaps players could activate the animations depending on how he or she was doing to show progress.
My first images (left) centred around Rube Goldberg-ish contraptions, with plenty of gadgets which could be used to build up animated elements. When you play Tetris, you are trying to maintain a careful balance of forces which you can and cannot control; the placement of blocks, and the rate the blocks come and their type. The animated backgrounds could encourage the feeling as the players performance wavered, like trying to keep a rickety old engine running.
The next step was to integrate the action with the gameplay. Finding reasons for the blocks to appear, and places for the spent blocks to go which, I felt, help with the abstract nature of the game.
Below is the progression of more refined mechanical level borders from my drawing (below left) to final render (below right) built by Jake Pokorny.
Below is an proposal of the planned animations for the full mechanical frame. The final result, which was completed up to the render stage, had moving pistons, shaking vents, drive belts, blinking lights, and steam.
Here are some of my other sketches for other levels early in the development.
When it came to the rest of the themes, although we initially had thought to loosely use the wonders of the modern world, as happens during the course of projects sometimes, ideas take a bit of a turn. During discussions audience accessibility it was decided the final themes should go with a more classic, wonders of the ancient world style, and so I tried to choose scenes which represented a diversity of global cultures. It was obvious we would need to include Russia, but that every continent should be represented in some way. The final ones were Africa, Celtic, Egypt, Greek, Japan, Mayan, Russia with the bonus Industrial level.
To the right is my attempt to write Tetris in the level specific languages.
Below are my sketches for the Mayan and Japanese levels compared with their final composite. 3D work by Jon McBain.
Keeping true to the original plan, portions of the scenes were set aside for animated elements. For instance, the clouds in the sky, the pond ripples, the candle flickers, the eclipse halo, etc. Each element was prepared and implemented separately.
The final screens were built upon layers of rendered images done in Power Animator and Softimage, composited, and heavily painted upon by myself afterward in Photoshop. Several people helped and were involved in the modeling of the objects within the scene, while i oversaw and worked on the bulk of the direction and Photoshop work.
Below is an image showing the single player Japan level’s largely raw rendered elements (shown without tweaks or colour correction). Everything else was digitally painted.
A great deal of detail and effort went into some of the elements making up the screens. This was partly to have objects for rendering animated sequences (firelight off metal, that sort of thing…, but most of which were never used). For instance, on the right is the pillar base from the single player Russian theme which was modeled with all the surfaces as geometry. I used reference from a National Geographic CD-ROM collection I had, as the internet was still sketchy for good reference photos at that time.
Some of the folks involved in the single player artwork include Scott McBain and Jake Pokorny, with also with great help (Egyptian, Greco-Roman, and Celtic levels) from Roland Longpre, Bryan Ewert, John Hayes, Sarah Meagher, Chris Kniffen, and Sherriden Routley.
For performance reasons, as well as visual complexity, the multiplayer modes could not support the animation or complexity of the single player mode. What was important was the core game itself and little screen space remained at any rate. Below is an example of the Mayan theme’s 2 player game’s sketch and final version, as well as the Russian and Japanese theme’s. I largely painted these in Photoshop.
A variety of real time models (wonders) were created that served as the progress guides – the more blocks you cleared, the more complete the wonder was. You got to see the final wonder after you cleared certain numbers of blocks. Below the St. Basil’s I built for the Russian level is shown.
The New Tetris was received very well, and noted critically as one of the best looking versions of the genre. Later on it was even included in a book of classic video games.
©1999 Nintendo of America. All rights reserved.