Tetris Friends

» see tetrisfriends.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

There was an ad before every match. That is the detail Wikipedia chose to keep about Tetris Friends, and it is fair: this was the only official Tetris ever built in Flash by the rights holders themselves, and the only one that made you sit through a pre-roll before a piece dropped. The company behind it, Tetris Online, had been set up in Honolulu in January 2006 by Henk Rogers and Alexey Pajitnov, the two men who own the game, as "the exclusive online licensee of The Tetris Company" for North America and Europe. Minoru Arakawa, who had run Nintendo of America, was the third founder. The site went live on 21 November 2008.

It counted six single-player modes and five for multiplayer. Marathon and Sprint were the ones from every other Tetris. Tetris 1989 replayed the old rules, and N-Blox was a plain version that could run anywhere. The Battle modes used the garbage-line rules of the modern guideline against opponents who were not, it turned out, in the room; Arena, added in April 2010, was the only mode with live players, and the press release that launched it announced the site's millionth registered user in the same paragraph. Playing earned Tokens, and Tokens bought skins for the pieces.

Its Facebook sibling was the bigger thing by 2012. Tetris Battle, the same company's Facebook game, carried the identical notice in April 2019, "Tetris Battle will no longer be available after May 31, 2019", because it was the company behind both that was closing. The last capture of tetrisfriends.com as a working page is from 18:25 on 31 May, still titled Free Tetris. The next morning the server answered 503.

The distance here is a stack, not a map. The license covered Europe and nothing stopped a browser in Ankara from loading the site. What stopped me was that the Tetris I knew ran without a login and without a pre-roll, in the Flash clones that sat on every portal and forum from 2003 on, and the official one, arriving in late 2008 with an account system and a currency, was solving a problem I did not have. I read about it when it closed.

~ the record ~

~ the licensee ~

Tetris Online was a company with one client. Its catalog ran from Tetris Party on WiiWare to Tetris Battle on Facebook, every title an official product on somebody else's platform, and the browser site was the only place it owned outright. When the company closed in May 2019 there was no buyer for a Flash site a year and a half from Flash's own end date, and no reason for The Tetris Company to want one. N3TWORK took the mobile license two months later, and EA's Tetris apps were switched off in April 2020.

~ the millionth ~

The 13 April 2010 release is the only hard number the site ever published. "Tetris Online has surpassed 1 million registered users on the official Web-based Tetris game destination in North America", it said, and the milestone fell on the day Arena opened, the community mode with live rooms and rankings that turned the site from a score table into a place. The farewell page later put the line clears at "many billions", a number that means nobody was counting.

~ after may 31 ~

The farewell went up within days: "Hard to believe it's been 11 years since the first Tetriminos dropped on this site, but time flies when you're having fun!" It thanked players and sent them to Tetris.com for "the latest and greatest options available". The domain itself no longer resolves, but N-Blox, the plain mode, still runs on a site of its own, and a fan recreation called Notris Foes is in development.

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