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If you’re familiar with the somewhat convoluted history of the rights to Tetris, you may be aware that Sega secured some arcade rights to the game.
Sega’s arcade version of Tetris was released into arcades, in Japan only in 1988, running on the company’s ’System E’ arcade hardware, which was based on its 8-bit Master System/Sega Mark III architecture.
That being the case, one might have assumed that a home port to the Sega Mark III/Master System home console would have been inevitable, however Sega held only the arcade rights to the game, and not the home console rights, meaning that such a home port never happened, but now, almost 40 years later, a homebrew coder, named Master Linkuei, has finally ported Sega’s 1988 arcade version of Tetris to the Sega Mark III/Master System, and it even runs on Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, too!
The Tetris Master System port is a 1:1 port of Sega’s original arcade version, and it even includes a save battery feature to save the game’s high score table.
This new Tetris arcade fan port for Sega Master System is available to download via itch.io on a “name your own price” basis.
Remember we told you that the rights to Tetris were convoluted? Sega actually licensed their rights for their arcade version of Tetris from Atari, which is why Sega’s arcade version was released in Japan only, with Atari releasing their own arcade version of Tetris in North America the following year. Just for the sake of clarity, this new Master System fan port of arcade Tetris is based on Sega’s Japanese arcade version of the game!
This isn’t the only fan port of Tetris for a Sega console to be released this year, as we reported previously on a fan port of the iconic Game Boy version of the game for Sega Genesis/Mega Drive.
