A missing piece of NES history is finally coming to Switch

N.E.S Tetris was released a few months after its slightly more famous brother, also developed by Nintendo: the iconic Game Boy version of Tetris. But while that game had a color remaster in the form of Tetris DXand 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 past decades, it has become the default choice for competition Tetris games, and in recent years a generation of young players have shattered records and rewritten the meta for the 35-year-old game.

Nintendo’s complex, tense battle with Soviet Russian bureaucracy and shady British media interests to secure its rights Tetris the late eighties is legendary. The main prize was the handheld publishing rights, so Tetris could be a launch title for the Game Boy. But Nintendo ensured that the publishing rights for the game were also secured on the console (outside Japan, where business partner Henk Rogers had already released the game for the Famicom).

Nintendo has guarded those rights with typical greed. NES and Gameboy Tetris were both noticeably absent from the recent compilation title Tetris forever. But as Game Boy Tetris is the main version of the indelible puzzle game, then NES Tetris can make a strong claim to be second.