Petris

Bricks fall, fall, fall — and you stare, watching where they fit. Petris is a Czech copy of Tetris from 1991, quietly programmed for DOS when Tetris was already everywhere. No licenses, no fanfare, no big production. Just a game.

It's straightforward: play from top to bottom, your goal is to stack falling pieces so they form complete rows. Once you complete a row, it vanishes and you score points. The game speeds up, the space shrinks, the pressure builds. Three blocks, four blocks, different shapes — nothing new under the sun. It's just about how fast your brain and fingers react.

Controls are basic: arrow keys move the piece sideways, rotation transforms it. No fancy clone with advanced mechanics, no spin or upward falling. It plays like the classic that was everywhere in the nineties. Memory details aren't interesting, but the gameplay was smooth and clean — if your computer was powerful enough.

Petris is the kind of thing that emerged when every other application was Tetris. It lacks the polish and sense of unique identity that better clones had. Graphics are middling, sounds are nonexistent. You played it because you had it on a floppy disk, not because it was the best choice on the market.

Today Petris is mainly a memory of a time when the original Tetris wasn't accessible to everyone and creators made their own versions. If you want to play a logic game from those days, better options exist — but Petris holds a certain authenticity of a coder who wrote it for DOS with no ambition to compete with the world.