Turns out Tetris Elements is my favourite Tetris.

And I’ve played a lot of Tetris. Atari Tetris, Nintendo Tetris, SEGA Tetris, Capcom Tetris, EA Tetris… I’ve even played multiple board game versions—and yes, there are more than you’d think.

But nothing fills me with joy like Tetris Elements, the 2004 THQ release that stayed stuck on Windows and Mac. Never consoles. Never handhelds. Just a weird budget disc for early-2000s computers.

It was meant to follow Tetris Worlds. ImaginEngine built it under THQ’s ValuSoft label. Mostly an educational-games studio, with a little help from a programming shop in India. Small budget, short schedule. The kind of game you’d expect to look rushed.

And it does. But it also tries things other official Tetris games never touched again.

On the surface, it’s simple: Classic mode plus five elemental modes. Earthquake, Fire, Ice, Stratosphere, Tempest. But these aren’t harmless gimmicks. They mess with the core game. Earthquake shakes the board and warps your stack. Tempest forces you to manage two rotating wells. Stratosphere drops meteors that can open perfect holes—or land garbage in the exact spot you needed clear.

Even the safe-looking modes have teeth. Ice will slam a piece straight to the bottom if an icicle hits it. Fire can chain explosions if you heat-drop pieces in sequence. These weren’t casual distractions. They were strange, playable twists on Tetris that you couldn’t get anywhere else.

And then there are the quirks.

The game says it uses the modern SRS rotation system. But pieces spawn in odd orientations, like the letters they’re named after. Wall kicks are inconsistent. The configuration files literally include a “–99, –99” coordinate—developer shorthand for “don’t use this”—as an actual kick entry. It shipped like that.

Hard drops don’t even behave consistently. Sometimes the next piece spawns instantly. Sometimes there’s a pause just long enough to throw off your rhythm. It feels half-finished.

Look in the game’s files and it gets stranger. All the rotation data, piece definitions, and rules are in plain-text .INI files. No encryption, no compression. It’s like the studio assumed no one would bother to check. That’s how players found five unused pieces just sitting there. Pentominoes, oversized blocks, even odd trimino shapes. All fully defined. None ever used.

The audio hides unused tracks too. Better quality than what shipped. There are unused menu graphics, leftover text strings. “Name Exists” sits quietly in the files. There’s even an unused “You Lose” screen. It’s a Tetris game with the workshop still attached.

Even the presentation feels slightly off. Clearing a Tetris flashes the screen white, like the game’s trying to burn your retinas as a reward. The music is fine—light techno, some nods to the classics—but the big feature was loading your own MP3s. And then the game speeds them up in pitch as your stack rises. A nice idea if you like drum ’n’ bass. Less nice if you don’t want your playlist chipmunked mid-match.

Reception at the time was muted. Two critics reviewed it. Scored in the 70s. People moved on. Hardcore players dismissed it. Casual players bought it in a bargain bin, played Fire mode once, and forgot it.

But the quirks gave it a second life.

The .INI structure made it one of the easiest official Tetris games to modify. Fans enabled the unused pieces. They rewrote gravity. They fixed rotation bugs themselves. It became a little laboratory for people who liked taking Tetris apart.

On Mac, it stuck around longer than expected. The disc ran on both OS 9 and OS X. PowerPC Macs could run it cleanly. Classic mode on OS X 10.4 ran even better. Intel Macs killed it, but by then it was already out of print.

On PC, it lived as long as people kept CD drives. No keys, just disc-based protection. When drives vanished, so did the game—until no-CD patches and Archive.org brought it back. Today it runs on Windows 10 with glitches. Windows 11 is hit or miss.

Its reputation now? Not a classic. Not even a cult favourite. Just an oddball entry people dig up because it’s strange, moddable, and unlike anything else in the series.

It’s not polished. It’s not balanced. But it’s an official Tetris that doesn’t fit neatly anywhere in the series history. And somehow, that makes it fit perfectly.