The super rare Minuet Version of the original Tetris

Als Tetris im Jahr 1989 initial auf Nintendo’s Game Boy erschienen ist, wussten wohl wirklich nur eine Hand voll Leute, dass es sich dabei eigentlich schon um die Version 1.1. des später mega erfolgreichen Puzzlers handelte. Die allererste Version von der gut 25k Exemplare verkauft wurden hat einen alternativen Soundtrack.

19.02.24

Wie super rar, die besage Version 1.0. ist wir einem erst im Vergleich klar, denn Tetris verkaufte sich Weltweit mehr als satte 35 Millionen mal. Heute suchen viele Tetris Fans nach einer der seltenen Cartridges der 1.0 und das kommt regelrecht einer Suche nach der Nadel im Heuhaufen gleich.

Immerhin kommt dafür lediglich die Japan Version von Tetris in Frage. Aber dennoch: Wenn ihr ein Sammler Achievement sucht…

Tetris ( テトリス, Tetorisu) is an puzzle game that was developed by Alexey Pajitnov at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and this version was published by Nintendo for the GameBoy and was released in Japan on June 14, 1989, with a North American version following on July 31, 1989. The games soundtrack was created by Hirokazu Tanaka, one of Nintendo’s composers. Tanaka is responsible for influencing how a lot of GameBoy games sound due to the fact that he programmed his own sound driver for the GameBoy in Z80 assembly language.

This sound driver is probably the most popular driver heard in Game Boy music, and was used by a lot of other developers. Of the songs present in the GameBoy version of Tetris, there were 4 songs composed, while most people only know of three, and two of the songs being arrangements of works from other composers:

„Type A“ is based on the Russian folk song „Korobeiniki“ (also known as „Korobushka“)
„Type C“ is an arranged version of „French Suite No. 3 in B minor, BWV 814: Menuet“ (transposed to F# minor) by Johann Sebastian Bach.
Type B, and an alternate version of Type A was written by Tanaka. The Alternate version of Type A, known as „Minuet“ was only released in Japan for the first month of sales, with an estimated 25,000 copies sold. When the game was updated to version 1.1 the song was replaced with „korobeiniki“.

The games soundtrack was composed by Hirokazu Tanaka.

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