Tetris Music

Having 30 contributors to this blog, there are a bunch of different musical tastes and it's great to share all of it to open ears. Although I think we're neglecting some genres... one being game music.

Back in the early '90s when I was a child, a little handheld gaming console made a splash in the gaming industry. This device I'm referring to was the Nintendo Game Boy. It was released in 1989 and shipped with the addictive puzzle game Tetris. I was only three when it was first released, but I still remember playing it at age five when I was first introduced to it... always leaving one of the sides empty, anticipating a stick or "I", trying to fill up as many gaps as possible with the other six tetrominoes falling, but the "I" never appeared and soon it was game over.

Tetris was first created in 1985 by Alexey Pajitnov on an Electronika 60 with the help of Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov. It was loosely based on a "classic geometric puzzle board game 'Pentominos'." (Tetris.com) In became popular in Moscow and after some legal copyright disputes, made its way to the Nintendo Game Boy. Pajitnov "derived its name from the Greek numerical prefix "tetra-", as all of the pieces contain four segments, and tennis, Pajitnov's favorite sport" (Wiki - G4 interview on 'Icons'). There's also a whole history page on Tetris.com.

The music is highly addictive even with its lo-fi, 8-bit sound. The most popular song that many artists have covered and has become known as "The Tetris Song" is "Korobeiniki" (Russian: "Коробе́йники"). There's also a variant/original called "Kalinka" that starts out slow and increases in speed and suddenly stops. It's "a Russian song based on a poem with the same name written in 1861 by Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov and printed in the Sovremennik magazine in 1861. Korobeyniki were peddlers selling fabric, haberdashery, books etc. in pre-revolutionary Russia." (Wiki). In the original Game Boy edition, it's called Music A. Music C is called "French Suite No. 3 in B-Minor" by Johann Sebastian Bach (which is my favorite). I don't have any information about Music B, the opening song, or the high score song. They all can be downloaded in mp3 format from KH Insider.

Type 1        Opening Song
Type 2 (A)   Korobeiniki by Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov
Type 3 (B)   Unknown Title
Type 4 (C)   French Suite No. 3 in B-Minor by Johann Sebastian Bach
Type 5        High Score Song

There are a bunch of videos on YouTube of Tetris parodies and people covering the various songs. Below are a handpicked few.

Parodies

Cover Songs

Jason :: Nintendo | Tetris | Wiki (Tetris) | Wiki (Tetris Game Boy) | KH Insider | Directory of Tetris Cover Songs