This weekend I had the opportunity to play Tetris Evolution, a game for Xbox 360.  It’s fairly Tetris-y, while not the best incarnation it is Tetris.  I love Tetris.

I booted up Marathon mode (the primary mode in the game).  For over an hour I played a rigorous game, placing blocks in their proper places and removing rows.  After a while the game got so fast that I couldn’t see the blocks even fall anymore.  It was almost purely block rotation and some minor shifting, as much as I could muster under the time constraint of block in motion to block settled.

Long story short, eventually I reached level 15 and beat it.  Then I got the Game Over screen.

Apparently the game only goes to 15 levels.  Once you beat the 15th level the game is over.  There’s no celebration screen, no unlimited level generation… just… game over.  Essentially I beat the game.  There’s no going beyond Level 15 so apparently I’ve must have maxed out.

That makes me sad.

Throughout my life there has always been this sense of Tetris never ending.  My mind is tricked into thinking that my Tetris playing is just a journey towards infinity and I have to see how far I can get.  Really, it could be that game.  The game plays towards that sort of notion.  Faster and faster and faster the game can go, and that alone can be the fuel for level difficulty.  Sure, the idea that the game could somehow outpace the processor or whatever I can sympathize with… but I don’t think about that sort of thing when I play as a gamer.  So when I beat Tetris finally I don’t really feel like a winner.  I feel like I’ve broken something.  Reminds me of some way-too-easy Donkey Kong kill screen.

I don’t know if this is every version of Tetris or what, but that was a weird bittersweet night.