I’ve said it once (or twice or fifty times) and I’ll say it again; games are amazing things. Even the ones that don’t try to be amazing, are amazing.  There are games out there that have no plot, no characters, games that have not tried to be anything but entertaining, that bring up more good memories than anything else I’ve played. And one of these games is Tetris.

Tetris is not just a classic. It’s not just a video game. It’s something that possesses the ability to bring waves of nostalgia crashing down on me, and it’s a game about falling blocks. But it’s also a game I played every Monday night on the way home from uni, with 4 of my closest friends.

Tetris Mondays started in semester 2 of my first year of university. The year was 2008, I was 18 years old obtaining my Bachelor of Primary Education, whilst my other friends were going on to become computer scientists developing video games for a living.

The university I went to was Wollongong, which is about a 1.5 hour trip south from Sydney. On a Monday evening the four of us didn’t finish until 530pm, which meant catching the 6pm train home and not getting there until around 8pm. The nights were freezing, and we’d all been awake since about 5am that morning. We were tired,  we were stressed out, and we didn’t even have the energy to carry on a conversation with one another. What we did instead, was play Tetris.

Each of us had a DS, and each of us owned Tetris. So for the entire two hour train ride we would verse one another over and over again. Each time the results usually ended up the same; there was always the friend who  would kick our asses, the friend who would lose abysmally (usually me) and the one who would silently rage when they screwed up. Mondays were a flurry of falling blocks and hilarious “that’s what she said” jokes that tied us all together in a neat little bundle of friendship. And if Tetris hadn’t been our game of choice, it probably wouldn’t have happened that way.

Recently it was announced that Tetris was being re-released on the PSN in glorious 1080p. Not only is this amazing because it’s Tetris in HD with online multiplayer, but for me it means that I can recreate Tetris Mondays from the comfort of my couch.  There’s also going to be a co-op mode, which means not only can I recreate this fond memory, but I can do it with my friends without having to worry about getting my ass kicked. Sweet!