Perhaps the most significant Nintendo game that’s never previously been rereleased is finally coming to the Switch. The 1989 NES version of Tetris will be added to Nintendo Switch Online’s NES collection on Dec. 12.
NES Tetris was released a few months after its slightly more famous sibling, also developed by Nintendo: the iconic Game Boy version of Tetris. But while that game had a color remaster in the form of Tetris DX, and a Virtual Console release on the Nintendo 3DS, NES Tetris has never been officially reissued until now.
Despite that, NES Tetris has an outsized legacy — and a surprising place in the esports scene. Over the decades, it has emerged as the default choice for competitive Tetris play, and in recent years a generation of young players has been demolishing records and rewriting the meta for the 35-year-old game.
Nintendo’s complex, high-wire battle with Soviet Russian bureaucracy and shady British media interests to secure the rights to Tetris in the late 1980s is the stuff of legend. The main prize was the handheld publishing rights, so Tetris could be a launch title for Game Boy. But Nintendo made sure to lock down console publishing rights for the game too (outside Japan, where its business partner Henk Rogers had already released the game for the Famicom).
Nintendo has guarded those rights with typical covetousness. NES and Game Boy Tetris were both notably absent from the recent compilation title Tetris Forever. But, if Game Boy Tetris is the single most important version of the indelible puzzle game, then NES Tetris can stake a strong claim to being the second.
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