The Specification That Made Every Modern Version Feel the Same

Rotation, kicks, the seven-bag, hold and scoring were unified into one rulebook — and it changed how the game is played.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, every version was an independent implementation. They shared an idea, not a rulebook.

How far apart they had drifted

Pieces rotated differently — some around a centre, some around a corner, some according to hand-written tables per piece. Some versions let you rotate against a wall, others refused. Randomisers ranged from a plain random pick, which could deny you a long piece for dozens of turns, to various ad-hoc anti-repetition rules. Scoring was arbitrary. The same shape was blue in one game and orange in another.

Skill did not transfer well. Someone excellent at one version could be visibly worse at another, not through unfamiliarity but because the rules underneath had changed.

What the specification settled

The guideline that emerged in the early 2000s fixed the pieces of the game that had been drifting:

• Rotation with defined states and wall kicks — a documented list of

offsets to try when a rotation is blocked, so spinning a piece into a tight gap became a reliable technique instead of an accident.

• The seven-bag randomiser — every set of seven contains each shape exactly

once. Droughts become impossible and the queue becomes something you can count.

• A hold slot, letting you park one piece for later.
• A ghost piece showing the landing position.
• Standard colours, so the long piece is cyan everywhere.
• Defined scoring, including recognition of spin placements.

What it enabled

Two things that did not previously exist.

Competitive play across versions. With shared rules, technique developed in one game applies in another, and a body of shared strategy could accumulate instead of fragmenting.

Deep, learnable technique. Kick tables in particular changed the game. Once the exact offsets are documented and deterministic, players can build setups that depend on a piece kicking a specific way — which is how T-spins went from a curiosity to the core of high-level play.

What it cost

Some character. The older versions' quirks were frustrating but distinctive, and a few of them supported techniques that no longer exist. Standardisation always trades idiosyncrasy for interoperability.

TETERI implements these conventions — kick tables, seven-bag, hold, ghost, lock delay, guideline gravity — because they are what players' hands expect, and because a decade of iteration produced genuinely good rules.

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