Monday, January 15, 2024

Are There Any Tetris Games for Mac?

John Gruber:

Not much has changed from 2018. There is an officially licensed game in the Mac App Store now: Tetris Beat. It’s part of Apple Arcade, so most of you can probably download it and play it. It’s not just plain Tetris — and whatever it is that it wants to be, it sucks. It doesn’t even let you customize the controls. It occupies 2.3 GB on disk after installation. For Tetris! Jiminy. Niklaus Wirth would be rolling over in his (fresh) grave if you told him a Tetris game took 2.3 GB on disk and made the fans get loud on an Apple silicon MacBook Pro when you play it.

The best options for just playing Tetris on a Mac are web games: Tetr.io and Jstris. (I presume both websites are hosted in countries outside the reach of litigious The Tetris Company.)

Plus the official Web version.

Previously:

Update (2024-02-01): Freehours9:

My all time favorite will always be Tetris Max on classic Mac OS. I play in emulated Mac OS 9 in SheepShaver.

Then Quinn on Mac OS X. I still run Tiger in UTM to play.

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The easiest way is to install MAME or OpenEmu (much easier) and play from ROMs.

I instead use a little handheld emulator (Anbernic 35XX).

iOS is a little harder, but there are several retro game collections that should have it, once you install ROMs.

We live in a fallen age and every game expands until it has monetization, social media, and a "tutorial" that plays the entire game for you. Old games are the only cure.

Why would you want to install Tetris on your computer? If there ever was a game that was made to played in a browser it's that, and Civ, and Wordle, and Zookeeper and ... etc.

I still have a copy of Quinn sitting around somewhere. Such a shame it doesn't run in modern macOS. That was the quintessential mac Tetris clone.

Yes, Quinn was great. Unfortunately, it was shut down for legal reasons (i.e. The Tetris Company threatened the developer). I think if it had been open source it would still be around in some form.

There has never been a better version than the original Russian one that was great on the first Mac and Mac Plus and, not that I understand quite why, it was the only program from Mac OS Classic that I ever heard of that ran on Mac OS X (at least early on).

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