I truly don't know why, or how, this happened, but at some point Tetris stopped being a series of very similar video games and started being a Brand. The perfect distillation of this Brand energy is the "Life" category of articles on tetris.com, which seems to have about one article per aspect of life describing how you could apply Tetris to it.
I love these articles because I have so many questions. How sincere is all of this? I mean, I've played a lot of tetris (uncapitalised because it was mostly unlicensed clones, of course), and I don't feel like I'm any better at packing physical objects for it, because nothing in the real world is actually tetromino-shaped (and physical objects don't tend to obey SRS). Do I just need to activate the Tetris mindset? Would imagining the road as a Tetris board actually make you a safer driver? Since when was the board called the Matrix? Is all of this just meant to be a distraction from The Tetris Company being really litigious? Am we in the Matrix right now??
Also, when did this begin? These articles started being posted in 2017 (and sadly, stopped around 2019), but I think the Tetris Brand has been like that for longer. This gets hard to research, because it's really more of a vibe than anything concrete. The timeline so far as I can tell is that Tetris held a marketing event for their 25th anniversary in 2009, which was so successful as to encourage them to release a line of merchandise, and thus slowly become what they are today. Where this gets weird is that there is basically a Tetris conspiracy theory that Tetris' actual date of origin was some point in late 1985, and the June 6 1984 date was a complete fabrication chosen so they could run a big marketing push for their "25th anniversary" the weekend after E3 2009. Mostly, I'm just confused, and no matter how hard I try to imagine the Matrix, I can't get the facts of this case to fit together.
Tetris poisoned my brain with “collecting and using old things disease” I got really into Tetris and wanted to do it competitively for fun so I got an NES and a copy of Tetris and now I have a very large archive of (mostly Japanese language) video games from the 8 bit and 16 bit eras (and onward) and I can’t stop

