While most Western Tetris players know about the clash between Tengen and Nintendo over the rights to release their competing ports to the NES, Japanese players got an exclusive earlier Famicom port from Bullet-Proof Software, who were also porting the game to numerous Japanese home computers of the era.
While not as internationally well-known as Tengen and Nintendo's versions (and nowhere near as good; it comes from the dark early era of Tetris before the introduction of soft-dropping), the original Famicom Tetris was successful enough to get a number of sequels and spin-offs of its own.
This version of Tetris would remain Japan-exclusive until 2018, when it was one of the many games featured in the AtGames Legends Flashback plug & play console. The game would also appear in 2019 for the Legends Ultimate Arcade home arcade cabinet, and in 2024 was included in the Tetris Forever collection.
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Debug Flags#
Two small debug features, and one additional development feature, can be enabled by changing three adjacent bytes in the ROM.
Changing the byte at CPU address C004 to a non-zero value (or using Game Genie code PAAGGA) will change the in-game music selection to have a total of eight options instead of the usual four, adding the music from the title screen, high score screen, and round clear animations as additional choices. Since this allows you to listen to all of the music in the game, it can also be considered a sort of sound test.
Changing the byte at CPU address C005 to a non-zero value (or using Game Genie code PAAGIA) will allow you to view the current round's ending by holding B and pressing Select. Doing this doesn't actually advance to the next round or stage, though.
In addition, changing the byte at CPU address C003 from 01 to 00 will switch the game to be compatible with the Nintendo MMC1 mapper chip, rather than the much simpler CNROM mapper that it normally uses. This doesn't actually provide any kind of benefit to the player, though.
All of these options are available in all three revisions of the game.
(Source: Original TCRF research)
Revisional Differences#
Three revisions of the game were released, referred to here as "revision 0" through "revision 2".
Title Screen Music#
Revision 1 added an extended intro to the title screen music. As a result, it also takes longer for the attract demo to start playing, since it only starts after the music has finished.
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Revisions 1 and 2 |
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Copyright Screen#
Revision 0 |
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Revision 2 |
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Revision 0's copyright screen reflects the infamously-convoluted Tetris licensing situation that existed at the time, namedropping no fewer than six companies (notably including Tengen but not Nintendo). The other revisions were released after Nintendo had definitively secured the console rights to the game, so the copyright screen was simplified to match, and Vadim Gerasimov's design credit was also removed.
Revision 2 added an additional line break after the BPS copyright notice.
Line Clear Terms#
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Revisions 1 and 2 |
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Revision 0 uses the typical line clear terms of Single, Double, Triple, and Tetris. In Revision 1 and onward, they use different terms for the line clears, reading 1 Line, 2 Lines, 3 Lines, and 4 Lines instead.
Graphics#
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Revisions 1 and 2 |
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When the copyright screen was updated in revision 1, a few additional punctuation marks had to be added to the font. In order to free up a tiny bit of CHR ROM space, one of the tiles used by the tall onion dome in the in-game background ended up being sacrificed, and the right side of the dome's base was edited slightly to compensate.
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Revision 0 |
Revisions 1 and 2 |
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Revision 1 also shifted over the horizontal I-piece's graphics by exactly one pixel, making it no longer line up correctly with other adjacent blocks, for some reason.
Other Changes#
- In revision 0, the attract demo has the pieces (and the player's movements) alternating between a faster and slower speed each time a demo starts playing. In revisions 1 and 2, the demos always use the slower speed.
- Revision 1 introduces a sound bug where clearing Round 5 with the music set to "Silence" will cause in-game sound effects to stop working after exiting the end-of-round fireworks display. This was fixed again in revision 2.
- Revision 2 fixes a bug where the game can hard lock if the playfield is left completely empty upon clearing a stage.
(Source: Original TCRF research)