Tetris (CDI)

Tetris

Platform:	CD-i
Year:	1992
Developer:	Philips P.O.V. Entertainment Group

For other games in the series, see Tetris.

Tetris for CD-i was released in late 1992. According to its box art, that's when "the classic became a legend". The gameplay is no different from other conversions. Various rotatable shapes fall inside a black rectangle. You have to fit these together in order to form a disappearing horizontal line and make sure that they don't get to the top. As the game progresses, the amount of lines to form increases.

Despite the visuals getting praised by many and the basic premise still being there, this port was heavily panned for having to move the shapes faster with a separate button rather than Down on the d-pad and having only three adjustable rules on the main menu.

Screenshots

The title screen.

Setting things up.

Making an early progress.

Playing with higher height.

Oh, now it's in a desert all of a sudden?

The high score table.

Music

Jim Andron saw Tetris as an opportunity to be able to compose freely, as he was frustrated by limited sound capabilities after working on Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (C64) a few years before. The development team would send Andron the FMV backgrounds from the game and ask him to score music to go along with them. According to Andron, David Foster may have been his major influence at the time. He had this to say regarding the instruments used:

“

Primarily from a Yamaha TG-77 and a Roland JV-10, both rack mount. I really liked the Yamaha, such great, clear sounds with bite.

Digital Performer was, and still is, my DAW of choice.

I might have had Sample Cell then, but I don’t remember. I remember waiting five minutes for it to load 8 megs of samples!

„

While most Tetris ports use renditions of traditional Russian ditties to fit the East Slavic theme, this one instead goes with a style similar to New-age. There's not a lot of music per se, but most tracks last over four minutes to compensate. As with many early CD-i titles, the music slightly suffers from lossy compression as a result of the use of Level C sound quality.

The tracks prefixed with 2 come from the prototype build dated July 1992, which has quite a few differences; there's an additional tune played over the main menu and some stage themes are missing.

Atwiki.jp said of the soundtrack:

“

The most distinctive feature of this game is the BGM. Although Russian folk songs are often used in Tetris, Russian elements are almost absent in this Tetris. All of the songs are soothing, healing music, and the beautiful nature background graphics make this a very soothing Tetris. There are stages from level 0 to level 9, and each stage has its own background music.

„

Recording

#	Title	Composer	Length	Download
101	Title	Jim Andron	0:19	Download
102	Stage 0	Jim Andron	4:30	Download
103	Stage 1	Jim Andron	4:33	Download
104	Stage 2	Jim Andron	4:35	Download
105	Stage 3	Jim Andron	4:36	Download
106	Stage 4	Jim Andron	4:30	Download
107	Stage 5	Jim Andron	4:34	Download
108	Stage 6	Jim Andron	4:38	Download
109	Stage 7	Jim Andron	4:29	Download
110	Stage 8	Jim Andron	4:33	Download
111	Stage 9	Jim Andron	4:13	Download
112	High Score	Jim Andron	1:37	Download

#	Title	Composer	Length	Download
201	Title	Jim Andron	0:19	Download
202	Menu	Jim Andron	1:20	Download
203	Stages 0, 3, 6 and 8	Jim Andron	4:40	Download
204	Stage 1	Jim Andron	4:43	Download
205	Stage 2	Jim Andron	4:40	Download
206	Stage 4	Jim Andron	4:51	Download
207	Stage 5	Jim Andron	1:43	Download
208	Stage 7	Jim Andron	4:37	Download
209	Stage 9	Jim Andron	1:19	Download
210	High Score	Jim Andron	0:58	Download

Credits

Ripper: Жукороп
Recorder: Жукороп
Game Credits:
- Music: Jim Andron

(Source)

Clicking the 'quit' button at the main menu displays a staff roll before resetting the console.

Game Rip

Format	Download
	N/A

The music is stored in RTA.rtf and RLV.rtf. IsoBuster 5.0 was used to extract them from the disc image. Since the files exceed the size limit and use a digital format, thus sounding nearly identical to the OGG recording above, the rip archive won't be included.