Skip to main content

Tetris Beat unlocks the rhythm of gaming’s most enduring classic

Tetris has gone through many permutations throughout its 37-year history. It’s been a Facebook game designed for social interaction between friends. Tetris Effect turned the puzzle format into a trippy, calming VR experience. Nintendo Switch owners even have Tetris 99, a battle royale variant that works surprisingly well. The tetromino format continues to keep us entertained no matter how developers T-spin it.

Tetris® Beat - Coming Soon to Apple Arcade!

The storied franchise has evolved once again with the release of Tetris Beat, a new Apple Arcade exclusive available today. This time, the twist is that Tetris has been turned into a full-on rhythm game where players need to turn and drop pieces to the beat of music. The game features 18 original songs at launch and plans to add one new track every week beginning in October. It’s a light service game that’s giving long-time fans a good reason to keep coming back to the addictive puzzler.

Recommended Videos

What makes Tetris Beat special is the way it continues a game design conversation that’s been going on for decades. Its fresh mechanics are in dialogue with previous Tetris titles, reminding us of how much of the video game industry is built on collaborative iteration.

Drop the beat

Tetris Beat twists the tried-and-true tetromino puzzle formula by honing in on the game’s hidden rhythms. While Tetris games let players drop pieces freely, there’s often a certain flow state that players can get into, subconsciously pushing them to play along to the music. Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov once described the sensation, saying “Playing is a very specific rhythmic and visual pleasure. For me, Tetris is some song which you sing inside yourself and can’t stop.”

The latest game was born out of that experience. Executive Producer Lawrence Clark says that quote was a guiding inspiration for the game. More specifically, Clark visualized the idea after seeing how the Tetris community was interacting with music. He recalls seeing a modded PAX build of Tetris Effect that allowed a pro player named Green Tea to specifically play along to the beat.

[Tetris 99] to the beat

“I actually got really into these videos on YouTube of people playing Tetris games intentionally in time to music,” Lawrence tells Digital Trends. “The game doesn’t reward you for doing that, but people play Tetris 99 where they try to hard drop in time to the beat. There’s some amazing videos of people doing it.”

Clark’s team took that idea and made a very deliberate kind of game around it. In Tetris Beat’s standard Drop mode, players start by picking a music track, each of which has a specific visual backdrop made in collaboration with the musicians. Players have the length of the song to rack up as many points as possible. Rotating and dropping blocks in time with the music grants more points. Leaderboards allow players to compete with their friends and try to perfect their ranking on a specific track.

A Las Vegas-themed level in Tetris Beat.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Visually, the game shares a lot in common with Tetris Effect. Initially released as a PS VR game produced by rhythm game legend Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the trippy game has since expanded out to PC and Xbox with a Switch port on the way. Clark says that the game, along with Mitzuguchi’s work in the rhythm genre, was another direct point of reference for the team.

“Tetsuya Mizuguchi is one of my heroes,” says Clark. “I had the first version of Lumines on the PSP, Rez on the Dreamcast, and of course Tetris Effect. The idea that he’s probably going to look at this is pretty amazing to me.”

Taking cues

In chatting with the team, it became clear that Tetris Beat wasn’t created in a vacuum. It’s a culmination of decades of ideas, both from other games and the community itself. The game’s Tap mode, for instance, takes cues from EA’s Tetris Blitz, a mobile game that shut down last year. In that game, “ghost pieces” appear on the board. Players tap one to select where the next piece will fall, rather than controlling it directly. Tetris Beat uses the same idea, but layers on its unique rhythm mechanics to keep players tapping on the beat.

In thinking about all the little tweaks and innovations to the game over the years, I couldn’t help but wonder why people are still so drawn to Tetris — both players and developers alike. Tetris brand President and CEO Maya Rogers believes it’s because the game taps into our innate human desire to organize.

“Tetris is the perfect game,” Rogers tells Digital Trends. “It’s one of those things where we have an inherent desire to create order out of chaos and it plays into that. It’s a simple game, but it has so much depth. Any iteration you play, you kind of get hooked into that Tetris zone. That’s the reason it’s been around this long.”

A pastel colored Tetris board in Tetris Beat.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

It’s wild to think that there’s still so much creativity left in the tank for a franchise as old as this. Developers keep stacking new ideas on top of one another, keeping a timeless series alive. That won’t stop with Tetris Beat, either. According to Tetris brand Vice President Casey Pelkey, the latest game is just another perfectly placed drop in an ever-expanding well of ideas.

“Much like Lawrence looked at Tetris Effect and saw things as a fan of that, other developers are going to look at this game and see things that are equally as impressive,” Pelkey tells Digital Trends.

Tetris Beat is available now on Apple Arcade.

Giovanni Colantonio
As Digital Trends' Senior Gaming Editor, Giovanni Colantonio oversees all things video games at Digital Trends. As a veteran…
No thoughts, no feelings, only Temple Run: Legends
Characters run in key art for Temple Run: Legends.

When I'm riding on the New York City subway, I'm almost always playing a game on my Steam Deck or Nintendo Switch. I still haven't gotten over the novel appeal of getting to take a complicated, graphically intense game like Elden Ring on the go. I'm spoiled, but sometimes I can't help but glimpse at the grass on the other side. Sometimes I'll notice a fellow commuter playing a simple mobile game like Subway Surfers.

In that moment, I'm torn in two. One part of me feels thrilled that portable gaming is no longer restrained to brainless experiences like that. Another part of me, though, wishes I was playing that game instead.

Read more
Apple Arcade’s most popular game is coming to PlayStation, Switch, and PC
Hello Kitty bakes food in a cafe in Hello Kitty: Island Adventure.

Apple Arcade hit Hello Kitty: Island Adventure is coming to new platforms in 2025. The Animal Crossing-like life sim will launch on Nintendo Switch and PC in early 2025. It’ll be a timed console exclusive for Nintendo before coming to PlayStation 4 and PS5 shortly after.

Hello Kitty: Island Adventure is Apple Arcade’s most popular game, Arcade Senior Director Alex Rofman told me in an interview earlier this year. The iOS game takes the basic concept of Animal Crossing and adds in popular Sanrio characters. That experience has only been available to Apple Arcade subscribers for the past year, but it’ll soon make its way to more platforms.

Read more
Ubisoft’s newest game is Final Fantasy’s Fort Condor with Rabbids
A Rabbid holds an umbrella gun in Rabbids: Legends of the Multiverse.

It's been a busy few weeks for Ubisoft. The publishing giant released a big shooter with XDefiant, launched The Rogue Prince of Persia into early access, and shook up the development team behind The Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake. That all happened ahead of the company's annual Ubisoft Forward live show next week. In the middle of all that chaos, you might have missed that the publisher snuck out another new game.

Rabbids: Legends of the Multiverse is out now exclusively on iOS devices via Apple Arcade. The new mobile title is a cross between a traditional deck builder and a strategy game where players have to fight off waves of foes by summoning allies via cards. Of course, it's infused with the hyperactive charm of Ubisoft's most chaotic mascots, making for a more kid-friendly version of its hybrid genres. While it may not be as strategically satisfying as the more tactical Mario + Rabbids series, this bite-sized oddity shows what kinds of games are a snug fit for a platform like Apple Arcade.
Fort Rabbids
In Rabbids: Legends of the Multiverse, players control an unlucky Rabbid who finds themself at the center of an intergalactic mishap. After a scientist gives them a camera that can take instant photos of any critter and spit it out as a card capable of summoning it, our little hero gets dragged across time periods in a spacefaring washing machine. It's a simple setup that mostly serves as an excuse to bring players to themed biomes like a fantasy realm and a Wild West world. It's cute enough for young players, even if the theming isn't terribly creative.

Read more