Mental Blocks Tapping Into The Tetris Effect
WIRED|November 2018

THEVIDEOGAMESOFTetsuyaMizuguchihave chased a singular, mystical effectone the celebrated designer first experienced 30 years ago, in 1988, when he wandered into an arcade in Tokyo.

Peter Rubin
Mental Blocks Tapping Into The Tetris Effect

A young college student at the time, Mizuguchi enjoyed the shooters and racing games but was mesmerized by a colorful, musical waterfall of 2-D blocks. “I put many coins into that machine,” Mizuguchi remembers. “It was such elegant perfection.” ¶ Tetris would not only become one of the most enduring entertainments of the age, it would also inspire his 2004 follow-up, Lumines, paired flying through spacey wireframe landscapes; falling shapes with the time-based elements of a rhythm game; Child of Eden, which came out in 2011, turned players’ bodies into the controller. Each one owes a conceptual debt to Tetris, marrying geometry and sound in a delightful synesthesia—but none more so than Mizuguchi’s latest creation, his own spin on Tetris itself. Out for the PlayStation 4 in November, Tetris Effect is a sumptuous update of the classic. It’s also something more, an effort to leverage a scientific phenomenon that may ease our way into a boundary-less digital future.

This story is from the November 2018 edition of WIRED.

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