Tetris is closing in on its 40th anniversary, and I honestly hope the gaming world celebrates that milestone in a big way. It’s no accident that it’s been one of the most cloned titles in history, and its popularity is such that it still pulls millions of daily players across all its variants. One detail many people miss, though, is that the original Tetris had no graphics and ran in text mode. The Vitetris clone by Victor Geraldsson is inspired by those early versions of Tetris, bringing all the action to the terminal of your operating system.
In an old interview with The Guardian, Alexey Pajitnov himself explained some of the technical limitations he faced when developing Tetris. The most important was the lack of rasterization on the Electronika 60 computer. In other words, the system could not produce graphics, so he ended up using a combination of text and special symbols to create the pieces.
The port for MS-DOS by Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov adopted a similar style, but also added colors. The history of Tetris on MS-DOS is a bit awkward (or at least, how Gerasimov tells it), but what brings us together here is the game itself, and one of its most interesting clones. Known as Vitetris is inspired by the original builds of Tetris and works directly in the terminal.
Vitetris: Classic Tetris Gameplay
Vitetris has been designed for the Linux terminal, but thanks to its open-source profile, we can now access ports compatible with Windows and MS-DOS. Its options are "single player", "two players", "netplay", and the mode switch. Mode A activates the traditional infinite Tetris gameplay, and Mode B limits the action to 25 lines, a sort of "quick play" for shorter matches.
In the options section we can customize the controls for both players, change the background type and the drawing of the lines, the style of the blocks, and even the color of the pieces. If players are going to share the same keyboard, I recommend configuring the controls before starting, while netplay mode requires following the instructions available in the readme file.
The rest is... start playing. There's nothing like screaming in desperation at two in the morning when pieces fly across the screen at level 10. Link below!
Official site and downloads: Click here
