Now you may wonder what is Tetris doing in the GameBoy category. The reason is simple: Tetris, while popular on arcades, needed a platform to propagate among the general population, and GameBoy proved to be the perfect platform. When GameBoy was first released, it sold with the Tetris cartridge included, a move that not only boosted the GameBoy sales but also made Tetris a household name. In fact, many speculated (and I think they have a point) that GameBoy was designed with Tetris in mind; such is the integration of these two.

Tetris is a very addictive action puzzle, where you have blocks of different shapes falling from the top of the screen. You need to manipulate them into a position where they would fill any empty spaces on the bottom; only if a row is full of blocks and has no empty spaces if disappears. The game gets progressively faster, and ends when your screen is full of blocks. The game offered several different modes of play. You could either play the simple game or one where a few blocks were randomly placed on the screen. In the latter mode, your task was to clear the screen, after which you get a small victory music, the first ending in a game I was looking for. There was even a multiplayer mode; you could connect to another GameBoy and play against another player. Every time you scored a big hit - several rows disappearing at once - a few random blocks appeared on your opponent's screen.

Tetris would never become popular without GameBoy, and GameBoy would never become the dominant handheld console without Tetris. These two share a unique symbiotic relationship. Unique, because of its tremendous success, which was fully deserved.


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