Tetris
- 57 tools
- No watermark
- No daily limit
Stack the pieces, fill a row, watch it go. This one is built to the rules people who play have muscle memory for: pieces come from a shuffled bag of all seven, so you never lose to a twelve-piece drought; rotation uses the standard offsets, so a piece twists into gaps it could not have been dropped into; there is a ghost showing where it will land, a hold slot, and half a second on the floor before a piece sets. It runs at the same speed on any screen, and holding left moves the same distance on every computer rather than at whatever key repeat rate you happen to have set.
Arrows to move and turn, space to drop, C to hold.
Score 0
Rows 0
Level 1
Best 0
Left and right to move, up or X to turn, Z to turn the other way, down to drop slowly, space to drop at once, C to hold, P to pause. On a phone, swipe left and right to move, tap to turn, flick down to drop and swipe up to hold. The best score is kept on this machine only.
Where it came from, and why nobody paid for it
Alexey Pajitnov built Tetris in 1984 at the Computer Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, on an Electronika 60, a machine with no graphics: the first version drew its blocks out of bracket characters. The name is tetra, the Greek for four, joined to tennis, which he played.
He was a state employee, so the state owned it. That single fact is the whole of what happened next. Copies spread out of the Soviet Union informally, several Western companies each believed they had bought rights from somebody, and by 1989 Mirrorsoft, Spectrum HoloByte, Atari's Tengen and Nintendo were all claiming versions of the same thing. Henk Rogers flew to Moscow that year and dealt with ELORG, the state software agency, directly. Nintendo got the handheld rights and Tetris shipped with the Game Boy, which is how most of the world met it.
Pajitnov received nothing from any of it for more than a decade. The rights came to him in 1996, when he and Rogers formed The Tetris Company. He had by then written one of the most played pieces of software ever made and been paid a state salary for it.
The rules on this page are not the rules of 1984
Tetris has been standardised since, and most of what makes a modern version feel fair is younger than the game. If you learned this on a Game Boy, the differences below are the ones you can feel without being able to name.
| On this page | In the original | What it changes |
|---|---|---|
| A shuffled bag of all seven pieces | An independent random pick each time | You cannot lose to a twelve-piece drought. With an independent pick, waiting twenty pieces for an I is unlikely and perfectly possible, and it ends games that were being played well. |
| Rotation that shifts the piece to fit | Rotation that simply fails when blocked | The bottom of a narrow well becomes usable, and a piece can be twisted into a gap it could never have been dropped into. |
| Half a second on the floor before it sets | It sets on contact | Precise placement at speed becomes possible at all. |
| A ghost showing where it will land, and a hold slot | Neither | Both are information rather than help: standing at an arcade machine you can see straight down the well, and the ghost is that. |
None of these make the game easier in the sense that matters. They remove the ways it could beat you for reasons that had nothing to do with how you played, which is a different thing.
Frequently asked questions
Is anything sent to a server?
No, and there is no server to send it to. The site’s security policy sets connect-src ‘none’, so the browser blocks network requests from these pages, so the page could not report a score even if the code tried. Your best is kept in this browser on this machine.
What is a seven-bag, and why does it matter?
The seven pieces are shuffled and dealt one at a time, then shuffled again. Picking uniformly at random instead means you can wait twelve or twenty pieces for an I and lose to the dice rather than to your stacking. With a bag the longest possible wait is twelve and the typical one is nothing like it. Every modern version does this, and players who have never heard of it notice immediately when it is missing.
Why did my piece jump sideways when I turned it?
That is a wall kick, and it is meant to. When a rotation does not fit where the piece is, the standard tries five nearby positions in a fixed order and takes the first that works. Without it, a rotation next to a wall or in a narrow well simply fails, and the bottom row of a well becomes unusable. It is also what lets a piece twist into a gap it could never have been dropped into.
Why does the piece not set the instant it lands?
It gets half a second, and moving or turning it restarts that. Placing a piece precisely at speed is impossible without it. There is a limit of fifteen restarts, because otherwise spinning a piece on the spot stalls the game forever, and a game you cannot lose is not one.
Is it the same speed on every screen?
Yes. Most browser games step once per drawn frame, so the same game runs at double speed on a 120Hz phone. This one counts milliseconds, so the pace is the same on any display and a dropped frame costs nothing.
Why does holding left feel different from other browser versions?
Because the repeat is timed here rather than left to your operating system. Key repeat rate is a setting on your machine and it varies enormously, so a game that just listens to repeats plays differently on every computer. There is a pause after the first move and then a steady rate, which is the feel arcade and console versions have.
Does it work offline?
Once the page has loaded, yes. Nothing touches the network while you play.
Can I play it with a keyboard only?
That is the main way to play it. Tab to the well and everything is on the keyboard. The well takes focus and only swallows the arrow keys while it has it, so the rest of the page still scrolls normally.