Tetris Effect — E3 2018 Announce Trailer
Let’s cut to the chase on this one. This trailer is straight up fire emoji.
Did you know that you could care about Tetris again? Because I sure didn’t.
That was before the trailer for Tetris Effect—which opens in outer space, by the way—proclaims right at the top that it’s coming from Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the brilliant creator of Rez, Lumines and Child of Eden, and it’s going to be in virtual reality.
That’s right. Tetris. In virtual reality.
Tetris.
I’m yours forever. There is no end in sight for us.
Already, that’s kind of wild, and it hasn’t even really started yet.
A monologue kicks in to describe “the Tetris effect,” a weird and very real condition discovered when researchers noted that amnesiac participants instructed to play Tetris later reported dreaming about falling shapes even though they couldn’t remember playing the game. Other experiments proved that participants who played the game had thicker gray matter in their brains than people who didn’t. Neat.
Nothing could measure the kind of strength inside our hearts.
It’s all connected. We’re all together in this life.
All the while, colorful jellyfish and bubbles and whales start appearing and floating through space. Everything bumps along to the beat of the song as it takes precedence over the monologue and you flash to different imagery: windmills, Earth hovering above the horizon on the Moon, two suns colliding. Then, only then—two minutes in—does Tetris itself take the stage.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve loaded the trailer up just to listen to that song. It’s an original made for the game, so that bodes very well for the soundtrack. It pulses and soars and flows so well with the action. When you finally see a bit of Tetris getting played, the blocks are moving to the beat and it kind of makes me hope the game either restricts your movements to force you to play on beat or at least rewards you in some way for doing so anyway.
Don’t you forget it. We’re all connected in this life.
I mean, listen. At the end of the day, it’s a Tetris game. It could end up being nothing more than yet another Tetris game to heap on the pile. That’s a real possibility, even with Tetsuya Mizuguchi at the helm.
But all the same, you have to give it to them: That’s a hot trailer. If you’re telling me you’re making a new Tetris game and I’m supposed to care about it, that’s how you do it.
