The Making Of... Tetris Effect

How Sunday drives, long baths and desert raves saw a classic puzzle game reborn

- Nathan Brown

The Eureka moment arrived, as Eureka moments must, in the bath. Tetris Effect’s first-time director Takashi Ishihara had known for a while that the project was in trouble. Games that bear Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s name are often narcotic experiences, but at this stage in development Tetris Effect caused some awkward side-effects: fatigue, difficulty concentrating and drowsiness. Ishihara himself woke up on more than one occasion from an unplanned nap, still wearing his VR headset. Even more worryingly, players were barely noticing the festival of sound and light kicking off around the field of play – the things that define a Mizuguchi game. After two years in preproduction, during which Ishihara had crafted a detailed VR design document for each of Tetris Effect’s 30 stages, showing how scenery and effects would build and swirl around the player in full 3D, he had accidentally made, well, Tetris.

This would not do. Ishihara’s career had been building towards this point ever since high school, when he first played Rez and suddenly knew what he wanted to do when he graduated. He studied graphic design and played a lot of games, but hadn’t planned a career in the game industry until he discovered, in Mizuguchi and his Sega division United Game Artists, a group of apparent kindred spirits. “They were even called United Game Artists,” Ishihara tells us. “Here was this group of people on the cutting edge, treating games and art as equally important. UGA were the only ones doing that kind of thing at the time. I knew I wanted to work there.”