Prototype Release: THQ’s unreleased Tetris DS

We bought and dumped a prototype (as well as a bunch of related documents), and we’re releasing them!

But first, some backstory.

Most people are probably familiar with Nintendo’s nostalgia-slathered Tetris DS. It had several unique modes that took advantage of the dual-screen setup, and was generally regarded as a pretty good game.

What people are probably not familiar with is that THQ was developing their own version of Tetris DS in late 2004. Information about this version has been quite sparse, with Wikipedia claiming that it was simply “cancelled” …

THQ announced Tetris DS before E3 2005, and scheduled it to make an appearance at the show. However, the company decided to cancel the game, and Nintendo released their own make of Tetris DS in March 2006.



However, the 2005 annual financial report from THQ (PDF) paints a rather different picture of the game’s fate:

Tetris Litigation. On April 14, 2005, THQ filed a complaint against The Tetris Company, LLC (“Tetris”) in the Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles. The complaint alleges that Tetris breached its license agreement and certain oral agreements with THQ, which prevented THQ from releasing a Tetris product for the Nintendo DS system as planned in March 2005. Additionally, Tetris has indicated that it believes the term of THQ’s license agreement with Tetris may have expired on March 24, 2005, despite THQ’s compliance with the requirements for renewal pursuant to the terms of the license. Our complaint seeks monetary damages and injunctive relief against Tetris, as well as a judicial declaration that the term of THQ’s license agreement with Tetris extends to March 24, 2007.

THQ ended up instead getting the rights to publish a Tetris game for the Xbox 360, which ended up being the rather mediocre Tetris Evolution.

This build of Tetris DS is dated December 4, 2004. While the documents suggest the game was still being worked on until at least mid-January, this one is still in a somewhat early state.

Now, it’s time to talk about the prototype itself.

Developed on a 64 MB development flash cart, the game itself only takes up a fairly small 6 MB. When booted, the game has a (temporary) icon and title text, featuring everyone’s favorite font.

Upon starting the game, you are greeted with a debug menu. The menu is shown only on the bottom screen, and has various options.

The “Test” menu lets you go directly to one of several screens, including each game mode, the rank in screen, and the settings menu. “Option” lets you configure most settings that you can get to with the in-game options, though the “Trash BG” and “Warning BG” options aren’t changeable.

The sound test is… well, a sound test! You can choose music with A and play it with the X button, or stop it with the Y button.

Pushing select at any time will act like the Xbox’s “Back” button, in that it will generally take you back one screen; e.g. from in-game, to the game settings, main menu, title, and debug mode. In at least one case it’s possible to softlock the game doing this, though.

Choosing “TETRIS DS” on the main menu or “Title” on the Test menu will take you to the title screen proper.

Pieces will fall from the top screen onto the bottom screen. You can skip the animation. After pushing a button, all of the pieces turn gray (starting from the bottom) and the menu appears.

The settings menu is rather spartan, but allows you to set if you want the “guide” (also known as “ghost piece” or “temporary landing system” for us TGM dorks), “Hard drop”, or to change the language. Most languages aren’t implemented and just use the English messages.

Hitting “Credits” will unceremoniously dump you back into the debug menu.

“Select Game” will (surprise!) take you to the main menu, which uses the title’s pieces as buttons to select one of 7 different variants (though only 6 are working). Each game offers the ability to play, view scores, or read the rules, which are explained using the top screen.



Classic Tetris is, well. It’s Tetris. The game allows you to hold a piece with the X button and hard-drop with the usual Up, but also maps L and R to hard-drop, which is sure to throw off any veterans of Nintendo’s Tetris DS.

The top screen shows your current playfield, and the bottom screen shows a zoomed-in version focused on the level your current piece is at. You can move the piece by tapping on the screen (it will “jump” to where you tap, but not through obstacles) or rotate it by tapping the piece directly.

This game uses the same “Rank” system as Tetris Worlds, where you have to clear a “goal” score in a certain time limit to advance. If you fail to clear the goal in time, your level increases, but your rank doesn’t. I’ll admit I’m not entirely sure of the impact each has, but the game does speed up quite a bit at the end. “Rank” caps at 16, where it displays an invalid Goal amount that never decreases. The high score screen will show this rank as “MAX”.

In Classic, “goal points” are scored by clearing lines, with small bonuses for the bigger ones.

Cascade Tetris is the same as Cascade from Tetris Worlds, and is basically just Tetris with gravity. Pieces are treated as one solid block that can be broken apart by line clears. Individual pieces will freely fall, instead of being suspended in midair as in more normal Tetris variants.

Goal points in Cascade are awarded by clearing lines, with increasing bonuses for every “cascade” (chain) you trigger per piece.

Hotline Tetris continues the Tetris Worlds theme, being largely the same as the other games from that series. Goal points are scored when clearing lines only on the marked lines, with more points for the higher ones.

Making this game somewhat more difficult than normal Tetris is the fact that pieces can spawn “pre-broken”, made up of multiple color segments. When placed, they’ll break apart. The game follows cascade rules, so this can lead to some… interesting problems.

When clearing a goal segment, all of the pieces on the playfield will break apart into 1x1 blocks, usually causing a big clear and filling any holes in the playfield.

This is the last “normal” mode. The next ones are all unique to Tetris DS.

Tetris Draw is … well. It certainly isn’t much fun the way it is.

The mode itself, in its current state, requires you to, well, draw pieces on the bottom screen. After they’re drawn, they will float above the playfield. You can drop them with L or R, and simply start drawing again to cancel (if you draw the wrong piece or, more likely, put it in the wrong spot). Garbage constantly rises, as well, so you can’t afford to take your time, though even with slowdown I still find it impossible to play this mode.

The help text says that you can only draw a certain amount of each piece, ostensibly to stop you from just drawing all I or T pieces. In reality, this restriction doesn’t exist, so go hog wild.

The documents specified a different, arguably more interesting take on the mode. Rather than being able to draw a piece anywhere, you would instead be given an “point block” randomly at the top of the screen, and then have to draw a piece using the “point block” as one of the 4 blocks.

This version would likely have been at least somewhat more interesting, though likely frustrating if there was no way to control where the “point block” appeared - if the player got a particularly bad string of luck, it would be impossible to avoid losing.

(The full design document and other materials are available at the end of this article for your reading pleasure.)

Tetris Warning is Tetris except played in a huge well – 48 blocks tall. Pieces will spawn on the top screen at preset intervals, with random positions and orientations. You can only control the bottom-most “active” piece, and control switches to the next lowest one after it’s been placed. Playing this mode without the Guide feature is all but impossible.

The falling pieces you aren’t controlling can (and will!) lock if they hit the ground, so it’s important to play fast and maintain control.

The game music will speed up if you reach the top of the bottom screen. Normally this music is reserved for when blocks are reaching into the “red” area near the top, but given Warning’s oversized well, it can play for a lot longer than other modes.

Tetris Trash is one of the more unique modes, featuring not one, but two playfields. The top playfield is your standard Tetris, just limited to an incredibly small 10x10 square. Placing any block outside of the playfield is an immediate loss.

The bottom playfield comes into play when you push Y. The top playfield will rotate 180 degrees, and the pieces inside will fall down the screen into the lower playfield. Pieces, on the lower field only, are affected by gravity (or “cascade” rules).

You can trash your top playfield as much as you want, as long as no pieces are outside of the lower playfield. As long as any piece is outside of the playfield, you can’t use the trash feature until it’s back inside the playfield again.

Clearing lines on any playfield will “break apart” pieces on the bottom playfield, causing them to fall and potentially clear more lines, which will cause more pieces to break apart and potentially continue the cycle.

If there are no more pieces to break on the bottom field, the individual pieces will instead be deleted, allowing you to eventually clean the field.

Lines on the bottom screen are worth very little, with even the largest cascades awarding very few points. The small upper playfield means you have to be very careful about where you place pieces, while the bottom playfield ensures you have to always be clearing lines.

Player Versus CPU Tetris doesn’t exist. Selecting it on the menu will instead take you back to the debug menu, and the rules option instead seems to talk about normal Tetris rules.

However, choosing “Versus” from the Test menu will take you to an (otherwise inaccessible) two-players-on-one-DS mode. Player 1 uses left, right, up, and down to move, with L rotating. Player 2 uses A, B, X, and Y, with R rotating.

The bottom screen always focuses on Player 1′s field.

Any line clear will send that amount of garbage to the other player, indicated by the red bars bordering the playfields. The game follows Cascade rules as well.

Any player topping out will result in Player 1′s side going gray and “Game Over” appearing in the middle. (If both players lose at the same time, the speed of the graying-out will double.) The game will then simply return to the debug menu.

There are several music tracks and backgrounds available, most of which are quite nice. The music is all largely based on classic Tetris (i.e. Russian) songs, though the names don’t quite match up with their real counterparts.

Also included in this release is a collection of documents related to the prototype, namely a game design document, some localization tables, and the packaging/manual art. The design document has a lot of interesting differences between the “real” game and designed one, and the localization tables include some notes between Tose and THQ, as well as some hints at things that were changed in a later version.

There were at least 3 known prototypes of this game that had been found; one earlier, one later. The whereabouts of the other prototypes isn’t known, unfortunately.

First, this prototype ended up costing me about $700. Purchasing and releasing prototypes is rather expensive. If you’d like to support our efforts in the future, please consider supporting us on Patreon or donating directly.

Without further ado!

Thank you for your support over the years!





Note: To play the ROM in DeSmuME 0.9.11, you’ll need the DS BIOS and firmware files, not included. Go to Config -> Emulation Settings and check “Use external BIOS images”, “Use external firmware image”, and “Boot from firmware (like the NDS)”. No$GBA is capable of playing the game without these files, but will have graphical issues for the backgrounds.