Tetris is not “the Citizen Kane” of games, but it is a sort of its Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: everybody can hum it off the top of their head but a really good rendition of it is still awe-inspiring.

See, anyone reading this can go make a Tetris. I mean it. You can go download a free game engine and a handful of tutorials and by the end of the day you will probably have some version of Tetris running on your computer. It being so accessible is perhaps why making a full-on branded, commercial Tetris is such a daunting prospect. The Tetris Company has an iron grip on what mechanics it’s willing to accept on their brand these days and there are three decades of other people who have given it a go already. How do you give a personality to a thing so constraining? What is there to do in an interpretation of a centuries-old piece while still following the sheet music?

There are two answers I’m not super interested about today, with regards to Tetris Effect. One is the visuals, the Lumines-inspired flash layered on top of the game. Those are cool, but they’re not why I wanted to talk about the game today. The second is The Zone, which may be genuinely the one new game mechanic added to Tetris in the last decade that will likely stick for future iterations in the game. The Zone adds a Super meter to Tetris, which is something that hasn’t worked great until now, and it works both as a safety mechanic for novices (you can’t lose in The Zone, if you get to the top the game just wipes the already filled lines and goes back to normal gameplay) and a scoring mechanic for experts (you can use familiar Tetris combo mechanics to clear up to a full board at once). The Zone is an amazingly elegant design that I love, but also not the point I wanted to discuss about Tetris Effect.

Hey have you guys heard about this game called Tetris: The Grandmaster? It became geek-popular a while ago off the back of a cool demo in one of the GDQ marathons.

The Grandmaster is a sub-series from Arika built aggressively for speed and dexterity. It’s skill ceiling: the game, and one of the more obvious, extreme examples of how much wiggle room there actually is within the restrictive Tetris ruleset. That video above does justice to how far it can be pushed for skill, but getting hands-on with it is a whole other thing. It feels completely alien to play if you’re used to either overly lenient contemporary Tetris or overly harsh classic Game Boy/NES Tetris.

It’s also a huge influence in Tetris Effect. I mean, there’s the obvious bit where their “Master Mode” basically uses Grandmaster’s iconic coloured blocks (and I swear they sneak in some of the sound effects also, but those are harder to catch).

There’s a lot more Grandmaster does that makes its way to Effect, though. That part in Effect where a fast board hits the music drop and mellows right out? Grandmaster does it. The animated backgrounds and music transitions? Yep. There’s even a secret playable credits roll in Effect where you basically get endless Zone for extra points that is very likely a direct reference as well.

And that’s not really random. Grandmaster, overrated by its scarcity and hardcore nature as it is, was the previous great example that the core Tetris mechanics had enough room to tweak them into something very different. Tetris Effect leans onto that concept really hard, despite playing nothing like Grandmaster. It almost feels like the Lumines connection was a Trojan horse, an understandable elevator pitch to get both audiences and the stingy rights holders to let them go explore the depths of Tetris rules and the kind of experiences they could craft using them.

That’s the interesting bit about Tetris effect and, while it’s a bit of a shame that the flashy backgrounds and millennial-friendly music choices muddle that point a bit, it’s definitely well made and very much worth looking for.