My Gaming Audio History: Tetris (1989)

Here's the first Game Boy game I'm revisiting in My Gaming Audio History.  I played this game a bit, but my mom really liked it a lot!  I wasn't very good at the game-- I got too stressed out when the pieces started speeding up.  But, I loved the option of selecting what music I wanted to hear.  As best I can tell from looking back at the games I played, this would've been the first game with a musical option to choose the audio I wanted.

Music is commonly credited as being by Hirokazu Tanaka.  This is true to an extent, as, to the best of my knowledge, he did compose the B theme, opening music, and high score screen music; however, he only arranged the A and C themes for Game Boy, he didn't compose them. A is a traditional Russian song and C is a movement of a French Suite by Bach.   It's very fitting that the A music is a traditional Russian folk song since Tetris was created by a Russian computer engineer.

The music's pretty simple, with three choices that play throughout the game.  Since there's no way to win, even if you max out your score, there's no ending music needed.  Since I've not examined any GB games before, I'm not sure how much music to expect in a typical game, but I'm keeping in mind that this game has about 3 minutes of music, and of course, some sections repeat.  Here's a little gameplay if you've been under a rock and don't recognize this game somehow.

Opening: Eb minor to Eb major.  38 sec.  A B B' I love the countermelody that comes in at B'.  This music makes use of all four GB channels, as you can hear, Bass, Melody, Harmony, and Percussion.  The other musical pieces don't use all the voices to allow for sound effects during gameplay.  This is a cool piece of music; I love the B section!

Theme A: A minor.  39 sec.  A A B  An arrangement of the traditional Russian song Korobeiniki.  The translation of this song talks about a young guy selling and haggling to a young woman while flirting all the while.

Theme B:  E minor.  35 sec.  Irregular phrase pattern: Intro (4) A6 -A'10 -B8 -B'8 -C8.  I can't find anyone who recognizing this song on the internet and I don't either.  I'm thinking it Tanaka's own composition then.  It's definitely the most musically "interesting" of the three pieces (forgive me, Bach).  I like the irregular phrase patterns.  It also just sounds more like typical video game music.

Theme C:  F# minor.  38 sec.  A A' B C.  This is an arrangement of the Menuet section of Bach's 3rd French Suite in B minor.  You can hear the amazing Glenn Gould play it in this video (5:48-6:25).  The only difference between the Tetris version and the original, other than the key, is that the last four bars of the piece are removed, probably to allow for looping without an ending cadence.

High scores: A minor.  30 sec.  A-A'.  Samba.  Reminds me of FF7 Costa del Sol music, which is in the same key!