A Redstone pro in Minecraft just shared a mindblowing feat of virtual ingenuity: a fully playable, gargantuan Tetris board. The game-within-a-game seems to work just as well as one might expect from any officially released Tetris title, impressing even the most talented Redstone builders.
While Minecraft has been one of the most popular games in the world for several years now, many players might not be familiar with the incredibly complex and seemingly limitless Redstone system. Redstone is a material in the world of Minecraft that can be used in conjunction with other materials and structures to build various interactive mechanisms. These mechanisms can range from something as simple as a single-track minecart system to outlandish contraptions like 32-bit calculators and musical instruments.
In the case of Reddit user mattbatwings2, Redstone opened the door to a recreation of one of the most iconic and beloved games ever made. While obviously not as fast-paced, flashy, or feature-rich as more recent versions of Tetris, mattbatwing2's creation is surprisingly faithful to the addictive puzzle game, carrying over many of its most important gameplay staples. The massive board appears in the sky above a platform where the player can use Redstone-connected levers to control the direction of each piece.
Just like in any standard Tetris game, players can control where each piece falls, rotating them to make them fit on the board. Filling up a row horizontally with pieces will cause that row to be cleared, with each cleared row adding to the player's overall score. Additionally, mattbatwings2 went to the trouble of including a smaller display that previews the next piece, officially making this Minecraft creation more advanced than early releases of Tetris.
Building complex Redstone creations takes almost engineer-level expertise, so the fact that players are creating entire games within Minecraft is unbelievably impressive. Additionally, the complexity of the Redstone system is such that mattbatwings2 must have spent an inordinate amount of time and dedication on this in-game version of Tetris. Beyond the pure, unfiltered fun of seeing someone play a beloved game within a beloved game is something more interesting and profound: the fact that games are becoming so advanced that they can actually be used to design other games. Hopefully, players like mattbatwings2 will continue to inspire other fans to make their own wacky creations within the game, as this sort of community involvement and fostering of creativity are what keep games like Minecraft alive.
Minecraft is available on all platforms.
Source: mattbatwings2/Reddit