I wanna hear em all! It can be a mostly-basic Tetris game with an interesting twist, a port of the game that has its own rotation system, or something completely bizarre! If it's Tetris (or at least Tetris-adjacent) I want to hear about it!
I'll start with a few of my favorites!
tetr.io (2019, Web)
This is literally the best tetris you can play today, and it runs out of a web browser. It's got ranked online, you can just make a room and invite people without an account if you have one, you can do cursed solo play like 4 wide playfields, and it's just generally real nice. It's not perfect, for some reason they refuse to put debounce on hard drop so some controllers will double drop on you (Like my PS1 pads), and they occasionally make some... weird... decisions, but overall this is the best tetris for Serious Play. Head and shoulders above everything else. You can also set up a mod to make it have TGM sounds, natch.
Of course, serious play gets boring. There's way more fun to be had with tetris than serious play.
The New Tetris (1999, N64)
Yes, the one with the weird text files hidden inside. This game uses a 631 bag and if that doesn't mean anything to you, don't worry about it. The goal of the game is simply to clear a lot of lines... like, 500,000 lines. You get line bonuses for building 4x4 cubes, bigger bonuses if you do those with 4 identical pieces. It's great to just sit down and tetris for a while, and it's got hot jams. The mechanics encourage some less typical play styles and I really like it a lot.
I should also point out here that, the N64 D pad is pretty good, and tetris games are wonderful to fire up on that one N64 controller you have with the shagged stick but everything else works great. Plus. this isn't even the best Tetris game on N64 to come out in 1999.
Magical Tetris Challenge (1999, N64)
So there's good news and bad news here. The bad news is, it's Disney themed, which is one of my less favorite aesthetics. The good news is, if you're into Disney themes, it's Disney themed. It's also very uniquely cursed in a very good way. The play modes are all vs of some type, either vs the computer or vs a human. Instead of sending garbage lines you send various types of garbage pieces, and they can get very hellish. The bag is shared between both players too, so it's just varied enough to trip up that one friend you know that has all clear setups on lockdown. The jams are again hot (and not disney themed), and it's another very unique take on tetris that you just don't see anymore thanks to the fuckery of The Tetris Company.
Fuck The Tetris Company btw.
Tetris DS (2006, DS)
I'm not even going to go into detail on this, if you like tetris and have not played it, it's Extremely Good and you should go do it right now. If you happen to own a DS, I may suggest playing on anything other than a DS Lite as the mushy Lite buttons can become very annoying. The Phat DS and DSi models (and 3DS family) do not have this problem. Of course, DS Emulation is also very solid as well. DSis are so cheap that if you're really into Tetris, you can just keep a few around and get multiplayer going with only one of them hacked, as the game supports download play. Those were the days.
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This originally said 49, but I got it wrong. It's 63. I don't know why I had this memorized as 49. Edited on like, July 19.
First of all, the aesthetics are unparalleled. I fully agree with the above post. There's a good reason I shove those sounds into tetrio.
But it is, in all of it's variants, very unforgiving. The "brutally hard" part here needs to be elaborated on a bit because, I think it will be off-putting to new players more often than not. The mechanics of the game are just a lot different from modern tetris and it's a LOT more willing to slam a piece down before you're ready. It's easy to top out, easy to misplace, and the game wants you to be able to play VERY fast on top of all that. For some people, the difficult aspects like the lack of a ghost piece and less forgiving mechanics can be either helpful for learning or provide the challenge they're after, but for others (myself included) it's just not really fun to try and learn. I put it in the same tier as something like DoDonPachi, a game I love and am bad at, for being pretty as hell but a HUGE commitment to learn if you're not already very fluent in the genre.
I also found Tetrio allowing me to build just a bit above the top and be more forgiving about topping out to be extremely beneficial to my confidence in playing, weirdly. Once I learned that I could dig myself out (or dig back down I suppose) from being WAY up near the top with a few bits sticking out, I feel like I gained a lot of recovery skill. It's super rewarding to be able to recover from that kind of stuff.
So this isn't really to say anyone shouldn't play TGM, just know what you're getting into. Nothing wrong with watching others play it instead, get all of the aesthetic with none of the pain. I do that for third strike, that game is beautiful in many ways but I can't extract any fun out of fighting games with how my brain works.
For reference, when I was in tip top tetris shape I was about 50th percentile ranked in tetrio. So I'm not awful, but I'm not super good either. Decidedly average. TGM is way too much for me.
One of my favorites has always been the NES Tetris—or TETЯIS, as it’s called in game and on the boxart—released by Tengen. It’s got one gameplay change that makes it unique to other “classic” Tetris games: the levels go on longer. It’s 30 lines for the first 5 levels, and then 50 lines from then on. Which is something I really like: it makes the feel more relaxed, I guess? You spent more time in each level, the speed ramp up is more gradual, and you get a better feel for each level’s speed. I also really like the aesthetics and sound of this version. I love the pieces being connected, let’s you see your previous piece placements in the stack and can see how they slowly break down as you clear the stack. The music here is also quite good (I recommend using this patch that changes the music every level.