Tetromino Hard Drops

A friend of mine (and former co-worker) had been bugging me about adding hard drops into Tetrominosince soft drops are kind of annoying, particularly when you’re at lower levels. I had actually been really reluctant to do that, because I was trying to base the game play as closely as possible on NES Tetris, but with the skin of the original Tetris. It turns out that the original Electronika 60 (nee PDP/11) version of Tetris did have hard drops, so I have finally relented.

My 10yo daughter is somewhat responsible for this. She pulled out the two Nintendo DS’s that my wife and I used to play on all the time, but which have sat in the cupboard for the better part of a decade. After changing out the batteries with some cheap Chinese knock-offs from Amazon, they’re both working great and I got some quality DS and GBA Tetris time. I realized pretty quickly how much it sucks not having hard drops.

If you want to check it out, try running docker run -it --rm pdevine/tetromino. If you have an older version, you’ll probably have to re-pull the image.  Alternatively, just check out the video below.