Tetrisphere!

Ahh, Tetrisphere. This one takes me back to my childhood in 1997, where I spent quite a bit of time at my friend Danny's house playing GoldenEye and Starfox 64. We'd play games at Danny's just about every weekend until all hours of the night. One time I brought Tetrisphere over and just mopped the floor with everybody...because everybody else was confused on how you were supposed to play.

Tetrisphere isn't a complicated game, but it's a pretty unique one that does take a moment to understand. In essence, there's a little robot dude trapped inside a sphere made out of Tetris-style block shapes, and it's your job to help him escape by drilling down through to sphere to create a big enough opening for him to escape. You drill down by manipulating and sliding blocks on the sphere to create situations where three or more blocks of a kind touch. Then your cursor will light up white over the touching blocks and you press A to drop a block. Once the block is dropped, the blocks will blow up and exposed the next layer beneath. It's pretty simple once you understand it, but even trying to explain the game here is making me understand why my childhood friends had a tough time figuring out what was going on.

This game has a bit of an interesting backstory. It was originally developed by H2O Interactive for the Atari Jaguar, titled Phear, but Nintendo execs saw the game being demoed at a Consumer Electronics Show in 1995 and offered the developers a better deal for the game to be published as a Nintendo 64 exclusive instead. H2O accepted but Nintendo's development deadline was too ambitious and H2O was unable to make the October 1996 deadline. The game was eventually completed, though, and it's still a fun game to play today, a rarity on the Nintendo 64.

No small part of my continued enjoyment of this game is due to the excellent electronica soundtrack, composed by Neil Voss. This soundtrack even won 'Best Soundtrack' of 1997 in Nintendo Power magazine. It's easy to see why when you first hear "Prophecy" on starting the game:


Neil Voss - Prophetic


Voss's techno soundtrack was incredibly varied and ambitious for video game music of the time, utilizing samples of things like Balinese singers and scatting vocals. The Nintendo 64 was not an especially amazing platform for video game music, but this is definitely one of the shining moments of the platform. Check out why:

Neil Voss - Faze


Neil Voss - ManicDrumMix


Neil Voss - Extol


Enjoy!