The hardest Tetris game ever, The Grand Master, is coming to Switch and PS4

The first porting of the arcade Tetris version to consoles since 1998 is a famously hard one. Publisher Hamster Corporation will release Arika’s Tetris Grand Master Famitsu reported that the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 will be available on December 1, and was confirmed by Twitter. Arika itself.

The Grand MasterThe game is famous for its terrifyingly rapid rise in drop speeds. It was the first Tetris game to go all the way up to instant gravity, which means new tetrominoes don’t fall but appear instantly at the bottom of the screen, and players have only a fraction of a second to move and rotate them before they lock into place and another appears.

This game’s title comes from the ranking system that grades players according to their abilities through nine ranks all the way up until Grand Master.

The Grand MasterA few sequels were made, one of which was a spinoff. Tetris The Grand Master Ace, which did make it onto Xbox 360 as a launch title for the console’s Japanese release. However, this is the first home release of the original game.

The Grand Master’s reputation has made it a staple for the world’s top Tetris players at showcases such as Awesome Games Done Quick. If you’re interested in seeing how fast this game is, check out the video below. And if you thought Tetris was just Tetris, and one version is never that different from another, then allow Digital Foundry’s John Linneman to educate you in his long but fascinating video exploring the series’ full history.

Hamster has been released Tetris Grand MasterIt is part of their huge Arcade Archives Collection. Although it has been confirmed only for Japan, most Arcade Archives titles have also appeared in Western stores. Since 2017, the specialist publisher has been reissuing retro-arcade games every week. The Grand Master is part of a double-header celebrating the fact that Hamster has made no less than 300 classic games available this way — the other game being the 1979 classic Galaxian.