I had a Nintendo Direct playing in a browser tab at work on Wednesday, muted, captions on, like a normal responsible adult who is definitely paying attention to their actual job. And then about forty minutes in, Nintendo does the thing where they drop a whole game onto the eShop while the video is still going, and I lost the rest of my afternoon to it.
The game is Tetris 99. It's exactly what it sounds like: ninety-nine people, all playing Tetris at the same time, on the same screen, and when you clear lines you can send garbage blocks at your opponents. Last block standing wins. It's Tetris but somebody bolted a battle royale skeleton onto it, which sounds like the laziest trend-chasing idea imaginable and then somehow just... works. I was skeptical for about four minutes and then I wasn't.
Here's the thing that got me: it's free. Not free-to-play-with-a-store-full-of-skins free, actually free, as in included if you already pay for Nintendo Switch Online (which is $19.99 a year, or you're already paying it for the cloud saves you probably never use). No battle pass, no cosmetics I could find, no timer nagging me to come back. You just open it and there's a match. I've paid full price for games with worse matchmaking than this thing had on day one.
The rest of the Direct was solid too, even if Tetris 99 stole the show by literally existing before the presentation ended. Luigi's Mansion 3 got announced, which, fine, I'll take a third one, the first two were great and nobody was clamoring for a fourth Mario Party instead. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 is coming to Switch this July and it's a console exclusive, which is a weird sentence to type about a Marvel game in 2019 but here we are. Fire Emblem: Three Houses got a real release date, July 26th, and an actual look at gameplay instead of just a logo on a slide. Yoshi's Crafted World got locked in for March 29th, so that one's not far off at all.
None of that is why I'm writing this though. I'm writing this because Tetris 99 is a genuinely smart piece of design and I want to talk about why for a second, because I think it's easy to wave it off as "battle royale but tetris" and move on. The smart part is that you can't actually see the other 98 boards in any useful way. You get a little thumbnail strip and that's it. So instead of the usual battle royale thing where you're tracking a map and other players and a shrinking circle, your entire brain stays on your own stack, which is what Tetris has always wanted from you anyway. The battle royale part just decides when garbage shows up and how much, and lets you pick targets (there's a "KOs" targeting option that goes after whoever's about to get eliminated, which is basically free kills if you're paying attention). It's a genre mashup that actually respects what made the base game good instead of just slapping a hundred players into it and hoping.
Small complaint, and it's not really about the game: the Switch Online mobile app, which you need for voice chat in a lot of online Switch games, is still bad. Not Tetris 99's fault, it doesn't even need voice chat, but I opened the app out of habit and remembered why I never use it. Clunky, requires a second device, feels like it was built by a different team that's never spoken to the team that made the console. Nintendo's hardware and software design has been on a real hot streak the last two years and then the online app just sits there being from 2011.
I did catch the news that Amazon pulled the plug on its Long Island City HQ2 plans this week too, and I have thoughts, but honestly not the energy tonight to do that one justice alongside a Tetris post. Different post, different day, maybe.
Anyway. I'm currently sitting at a personal best of 4th place, one match, extremely fluky run where three other people took each other out near the end. I'll take it. If you've got a Switch and an online subscription gathering dust, go download this thing, it costs you nothing you're not already paying.