Tetris Forever Games: All 21 and Which Are Worth Playing

Tetris Forever's Steam page still promises "more than 15 playable classic games". Digital Eclipse's own count, in its February 2025 update post, is 21, after two free updates added three games. The classic games run from a recreation of the 1984 Soviet original to a 1998 Game Boy Color puzzle game, one of them is a game of Go with no falling blocks in it at all, and the 21st is a new Tetris made for the collection.

Our which Tetris to play guide covers whether to buy the collection. This post is the inventory: every playable game, what its rules actually are, what each update added, and which ones to open first. If you have seen a list of 18 elsewhere, it is missing games: tetris.wiki's, for example, lists 18 besides Time Warp and has neither of the two added in February 2025. Game rules come from tetris.wiki, Wikipedia and StrategyWiki pages on the original releases; the update history comes from Digital Eclipse's own posts and the game's Steam news feed.

All 21 at a glance

The lineup is Wikipedia's games table checked against Digital Eclipse's update notes, and the years are the original releases per tetris.wiki, Wikipedia and StrategyWiki. Subtract the three post-launch additions from Digital Eclipse's 21 and the collection launched on 12 November 2024 with 18, Time Warp included; that is our arithmetic, not a figure Digital Eclipse published. Tetris Forever is the third game in Digital Eclipse's Gold Master Series of interactive documentaries, after The Making of Karateka and Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, and it costs $34.99 on Steam as of 25 October 2026.

The oldest versions score pieces, not lines

The AcademySoft and Spectrum HoloByte versions do not pay for lines. tetris.wiki's pages on the AcademySoft and Spectrum HoloByte releases say a cleared line scores nothing, and its Electronika 60 page lists only per-piece points; the score comes from each piece you place.

So in all three, the faster you drop, the more you score, and tetris.wiki's advice for the Spectrum HoloByte game is to drop as soon as possible. In the AcademySoft and Spectrum HoloByte games, a Tetris is just four lines gone. These are the original games' rules; Digital Eclipse says its Electronika 60 recreation was updated in February 2025 to be "even more historically accurate", and tetris.wiki says Tetris Forever offers it in two editions, labelled 1984 and 1985.

The two AcademySoft builds are both MS-DOS ports of Alexey Pajitnov's code by Vadim Gerasimov, who tetris.wiki says was sixteen when he made the first one. The launch build is the one with the 1986 copyright screen, per Nintendo Life's report on the announcement. Version 3.12, added in February 2025, is the 1988 release, which Digital Eclipse calls the final version made inside the Soviet Union's Academy of Sciences. Its party trick is Phantom mode, where every O piece is invisible.

The Spectrum HoloByte game was the first commercial release of Tetris, per tetris.wiki, out on MS-DOS in January 1988 and on Apple II that July. Tetris Forever has both.

The two later DOS games are different animals:

• Welltris (1989) is, per Wikipedia, the first Tetris sequel Pajitnov designed, with Andrei Snegov. Pieces slide down the four walls of a well, viewed from above, onto an 8-by-8 floor, and lines clear both horizontally and vertically. A piece that stops with any part still on a wall freezes that wall for a while; freeze all four and the game is over.
• Super Tetris (1991) is Spectrum HoloByte's own sequel. Per Digital Eclipse and tetris.wiki, each round starts with a lower field of preset garbage holding power-ups, you get 50 pieces, each cleared line adds two more, every line clear drops a block of 2 to 12 bombs into the queue, and the round ends when the garbage is gone. It has cooperative and competitive two-player modes in which both players share one field, and tetris.wiki notes a diagonal drop that moves a piece one cell down and across.

Famicom Tetris and a game of Go

Tetris (Famicom, 22 December 1988) is Bullet-Proof Software's port, which tetris.wiki calls the first home console version of Tetris. Two things will trip a modern player. Down rotates and A hard drops, because the controls were carried over from BPS's computer versions. And it is a stage game, not a marathon: six rounds of ten stages, 25 lines to clear each stage, faster gravity every stage, taller starting garbage every round, and three lives.

Igo: Kyū Roban Taikyoku (1987) is Go on a 9-by-9 board, with a lesson mode. StrategyWiki credits Henk Rogers, BPS's founder, as the designer, and says the idea for a Famicom Go game came up during one of his games of Go against Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo's head at the time. It is the one entry on the list you do not stack anything in.

Hatris, three times

Hatris was designed in 1989 by Pajitnov and Vladimir Pokhilko, per tetris.wiki. Hats fall in pairs into six columns; stack five of the same type and they clear. Clear two stacks with one pair and that is a "hatris". Each hat type is a different height, so columns fill at different rates, and a column that crosses the limit line ends the game. Tetris Forever carries three versions, and they are not the same game:

The Bombliss line: six games, one idea

Six of the 21 are Bombliss games. Wikipedia credits the idea to Akihiko Miura, and says Pajitnov was shown the concept in Japan in the spring of 1989. The rules, per tetris.wiki:

• Pieces carry bombs. A filled row does not vanish; the bombs in it explode, and the explosion grows with the number of rows filled at once.
• Four small bombs in a 2-by-2 square fuse into a large bomb, with a fixed blast.
• Unsupported blocks fall after a blast, which allows chain reactions.
• Contest mode is the main event. Each stage starts you on 100 points, every piece costs 1, big explosions pay points back, and clearing the whole field banks what is left and moves you on.

The blast sizes differ by game. Two of tetris.wiki's tables:

How the six differ:

• Tetris 2 + Bombliss (Famicom, 1991) has Tetris A-Type, a 25-line B-Type and a C-Type with rising garbage, plus Bombliss with five-block pieces, 60 Contest stages, a Puzzle mode with fixed pieces and a Construction mode for ten stages of your own. tetris.wiki says it was possibly the first game to give the S, Z and I pieces four rotation states; our wall kicks guide picks up the BPS rotation lineage from there.
• Super Tetris 2 + Bombliss (Super Famicom, 1992) upgrades the graphics and drops Construction mode.
• Genteiban (1994), the limited edition, replaces Contest stages 1 to 30 with new layouts.
• Super Bombliss (Game Boy, 1995) is the game the West got as Tetris Blast. It uses two-, three- and four-block pieces and has a Training mode with four previews and a Fight mode against a creature that moves through your stack.
• Super Bombliss (Super Famicom, 1995) came out the same day as the Game Boy version, 17 March 1995, per Wikipedia.
• Super Bombliss DX (Game Boy Color, 1998) is the Game Boy game re-released in Japan with a puzzle mode based on the Super Famicom one.

Tetris Battle Gaiden shares your next piece

Released only in Japan on 24 December 1993, Tetris Battle Gaiden got its first international release through Tetris Forever, per Wikipedia. Its rules, from tetris.wiki:

• One preview queue of three pieces, shared by both players. Whoever places first takes the next piece in line.
• Some pieces carry crystals. Clear a line holding one to collect it, so part of the game is grabbing the crystal pieces and leaving your opponent the plain ones.
• Crystals buy attacks. Each character has four, unlocked as your crystal count rises; press Up to fire one, which also throws away the piece in play for both players. One crystal per level is the default, and the options let you raise it to five.
• Garbage pushed above the field is deleted. You only top out by placing a piece above the 20th row.

tetris.wiki documents ten characters; the Battle World screen above shows eight portraits. A few of their level 4 attacks give the flavour: Halloween's Bomb destroys random blocks on your opponent's field, Mirurun's Sirtet turns their stack inside out, swapping holes for blocks, and Dragon's Change swaps your field with theirs.

Wikipedia quotes Pajitnov calling it "a rushed production" while ranking it among the best of the early Tetris games, and says it was Famitsu's highest-rated puzzle game of 1993.

Super Tetris 3: three rule sets and four players

Super Tetris 3 (Super Famicom, 16 December 1994) is three games in one cartridge, per tetris.wiki:

• Tetris Classic in two forms: Endless, which levels up every (level + 1) x 10 lines and labels the levels after 29 S0 to S9, and Standard, BPS's stage format of 6 rounds, 10 stages and 3 lives. Its randomizer rerolls a piece that would be the third of its kind in a row. Each game ends with a rank, from Beginner up to Omega at 999 lines.
• Magicaliss colours its pieces red, green or blue, alongside small silver pieces that a line clear does not remove; four rotations in the same direction change the colour. A line of one colour wipes every block of that colour off the field.
• Sparkliss is Bombliss with bombs that blast along their row and column.

Then Familiss, for two to four players, which tetris.wiki calls the series' first four-player mode. In the separate two-player versus mode for Tetris, each cleared line sends one line of garbage, with a single gap that moves every 10 lines; our downstacking guide notes the same 1:1 ratio against the Guideline table.

Tetris Time Warp, the one new game

Time Warp is a modern Guideline game with hold and a next queue, built by Digital Eclipse for the collection, for one to four players. Now and then a special piece drops. Clear a line with it and you are warped into an older ruleset for 20 seconds, per tetris.wiki:

The screenshot at the top of this page shows all three challenge screens beside the modern field. Pass and you earn bonus points; fail and you return with none. Only one special piece can be on the board at once. In multiplayer, a line cleared with the special piece sends your opponents into the warp instead.

Two updates reshaped it. December 2024 added per-player control remapping, which Digital Eclipse called the most requested change. The February 2025 update added:

• Levels 16 to 30 in single-player, which used to stop at 15. From level 20 the golden Time Warp piece and its "Matrix-clearing cascades" are gone, and from level 28 pieces lock much faster.
• A Shield in multiplayer that blocks one incoming warp. The Steam note says you earn it by clearing a line that includes the Time Warp piece while it shows the Shield design; Digital Eclipse's own post says by locking that piece down.
• 1989 Mode options: switch off "Modern Gameplay" for more historical accuracy, and play an 18-row Matrix instead of 20, which is the height of the 1989 Game Boy well.
• A 40-line challenge in both Modern and 1989 modes.
• An options menu with Initial Hold and Initial Rotation, which our Guideline explainer covers, plus a Diagonals setting and visual and sound toggles.

On Steam the multiplayer is local: the store page lists shared and split-screen PvP and Remote Play Together, and no online PvP category.

The documentary is the other half

The games sit inside a museum. Wikipedia's summary of the coverage describes five timelines of photographs, interviews and scans of original adverts, and the timeline screen above carries a Play Games button. Digital Eclipse's page says the collection has over 90 minutes of new documentary footage built around Pajitnov and Henk Rogers. Wikipedia and tetris.wiki list Maya Rogers, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, Gilman Louie, Doug Carlston and Phil Adam among the other interviewees. The collection was nominated for the 2025 BAFTA Games Award for Game Beyond Entertainment.

Four updates in four months

Digital Eclipse's January note says progress in those games now survives a reset without using the in-game Save/Load menu. Its February post also mentions physical editions, then on preorder through Limited Run Games and atari.com. Steam's event feed for the game, read on 25 October 2026, lists those four updates and nothing after 26 February 2025.

What is not in it

None of Nintendo's own versions. Wikipedia notes the collection leaves out games developed by Nintendo, and that NES Tetris was announced for Nintendo Switch Online in the same Nintendo Direct that revealed Tetris Forever. Nintendo's US news pages list Game Boy Tetris in the Switch Online Game Boy library in a post dated 8 February 2023, and announce NES Tetris and Tetris DX in one dated 11 December 2024. Time Warp's Game Boy era is a homage, not the cartridge. For the real rules, see our Game Boy Tetris explainer, Tetris DX explainer and NES level transition guide.

Which to open first

This part is opinion, built on the rules above.

• Coming from TETR.IO or Tetris 99: Tetris Battle Gaiden. A shared preview and crystal-bought attacks turn the next piece into something you fight over.
• Curious how Tetris started: AcademySoft, then the Electronika 60. Scoring by drop speed instead of lines changes what a good game looks like, and v. 3.12 adds Phantom mode on top.
• Puzzle players: Tetris 2 + Bombliss, for Contest and Puzzle modes and the Construction mode the Super Famicom version dropped.
• A couch with three friends: Time Warp, which Digital Eclipse built for up to four players.
• Skip unless you are curious: the second and third Hatris and the duplicate Bombliss editions, which are variations on a game you will already have tried.

More Tetris coverage is on the Tetris coverage hub.

Quick Action Checklist

• Count on 21 playable games, Time Warp included; a list of 18 is missing the February 2025 additions.
• In the Electronika 60, AcademySoft and Spectrum HoloByte versions, score by dropping fast; AcademySoft and Spectrum HoloByte pay nothing for line clears.
• Turn on Phantom mode in AcademySoft v. 3.12 for invisible O pieces.
• Remember Famicom Tetris rotates with Down and hard drops with A.
• Learn Bombliss in Tetris 2 + Bombliss Contest: 100 points a stage, minus 1 per piece.
• In Battle Gaiden, grab crystal pieces from the shared preview and leave the plain ones.
• In Time Warp, clear a Double in the Game Boy era and a big bomb in the Bombliss era within 20 seconds.
• Look for NES, Game Boy and Tetris DX on Nintendo Switch Online, not here.