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August 19th, 2015 
Carl Williams 
It is a well-known story that Sega had put their hat in the ring to get Tetris for their console, the Sega Genesis, back in the late 80’s. It didn’t pan out as they apparently licensed it from the wrong company (whom had the rights to the computer version but not the console version) and Nintendo laughed all the way to the bank as they licensed Tetris directly from Elorg, the Russian “company” that held the rights. This also effected Tengen and their version of Tetris for the NES had to be pulled, but their arcade game was fine. Licensing nightmare is just the beginning of the terms that come to mind here. Thanks to homebrew developers, “tripledonkey” and “Sherpa” another version of Tetris is available for the Sega Master System.
Imagine how gaming might have turned if Sega had been the one to hold the console and handheld rights to Tetris? Would the Game Boy have been as popular as it was if it had, say, Super Mario Land as the pack-in instead of Tetris? Who knows? It is a fun “what if” scenario to go down though (maybe someday we will).
Bloki is not an official port, by any means, of Tetris but it is still quite faithful. Currently Bloki is at version 1.03 and counting as “tripledonkey” is continuing to update the code and release new versions. For fans of Tetris, here you go, an SMS version to play. As mentioned on the SMSPower page, this version has not been tested on real hardware yet but if you have that capability, a heads up on if it works would be great.
Personally I enjoy seeing homebrew like this. It gives fans of various platforms a chance to play games they might have otherwise missed out on (and probably did, depending on how strong that brand bias is).
Edit: DansDans has pointed out that there is another version of Tetris available for the Sega Master System. Super Tetris was reviewed by DefunctGames.com here. As you can see from their review, Super Tetris resembles Tengen’s version quite a bit while Bloki has more in common with Nintendo’s version, graphically.
Source: SMSPower.org via PDRoms.de
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Um… Carl? http://www.defunctgames.com/review/819/super-tetris
Thanks for the heads up there, Dans. I will update the news article accordingly tonight after work. I could have sworn this was the first port of the popular game (not sure why) to the SMS.
No problems! I love the Master System, so glad to help
It is with comments like yours, Dan, that we are able to make RGM just a little better for everyone. Thank you.
[…] source: RetroGamingMagazine […]
Thanks for featuring my game Carl. Regarding the Super Tetris story – well I wasn’t aware of it either at the time and it seems it may have only been released in Korea and was unlicensed.
In case you’re interested it seems to be a port from Tetris on the Sega System E arcade hardware*. This explains the rapid increase in difficulty on Super Tetris.
My game isn’t the first Tetris clone for the SMS, a game called Tetracycline came first.
If you’d like to see any features in Bloki please ask as it may spur me on to get hacking on it again.
*The Sega E hardware is based on the SMS hardware but has two VDPs, twice the RAM per VDP and twice the RAM for CPU. The Tetris on System E looks to use none of the extra RAM or VDPs so would have ported very easily to the SMS.