It’s Sunday again, so it’s time to let down our various hair and relax! So now, a little tidbit from the PS1 era.

Back in the days of the Nintendo 64, two competing versions of Tetris were being developed, one for the N64, the other for the Sony PlayStation^*. Even through (or, perhaps, because) they were published by different companies, they were given confusingly similar names. PlayStation got “The Next Tetris,” while the N64 got “The New Tetris.” I still have to check to make sure I haven’t confused them.

The internet was a much younger place then, and a lot of Nintendo fandom at the time was centered on IGN’s N64 site. So, the things their writers and editors liked tended to get outside representation, resulting in some weird early memes like “Eye Tat boy.” (“A GoldenEye is an eye tat is golden.”) Wow, I’m really dating myself with that one.

Well, one of the things that IGN liked was the musical work of Neil Voss, who composed the excellent soundtrack to early N64 puzzler Tetrisphere, from H₂O Entertainment. The success of Tetrisphere got H₂O the license to make The New Tetris, and Neil Voss the job of composing its excellent music. IGN did a two-part interview with Voss way back then: Part 1 – Part 2.

The above title is a particularly memorable tune from The New Tetris. Me and my roommates back in college would play TNT for hours (generally it’s a good rendition), and every time the Africa theme came up, we couldn’t resist, when the music reached the refrain, singing along with our best English approximation: “Move to Canada!” No actual moving to Canada was intended or implied, it’s just what it sounded like, to us.

^* To this day, I rebel every time I’m asked to capitalize the S in PlayStation. I also twitch every time I’m asked to write Xbox instead of X-box. I have an English degree, dammit.

rodneylives