Hirokazu Tanaka · Tetris · Game Boy · 1989
Hirokazu Tanaka's Game Boy Tetris score turned a nineteenth-century Russian folk song into the most recognisable piece of music in video games — and hid Bach and Tchaikovsky alongside it.
The Game Boy Tetris let players choose one of three background tracks, or play with sound effects only, and that small menu made its music unusually personal: everybody had a favourite. The soundtrack was created by Hirokazu Tanaka, the Nintendo composer who had already scored Metroid and would go on to Mother. Music A is an arrangement of "Korobeiniki", a Russian folk song also known as "Korobushka", and through the Game Boy it became the melody that most of the world simply calls the Tetris theme. Music C is an arrangement of the Menuet from Johann Sebastian Bach's French Suite No. 3 in B minor, transposed to F-sharp minor. The celebratory music played when the player completes stages is Tchaikovsky's "Trepak" from The Nutcracker, in different arrangements. The famous line-up was not there from the very start. In an early version released only in Japan, estimated at around 25,000 copies, Music A was the Minuet rather than Korobeiniki. The version that shipped to the rest of the world — alongside the Game Boy itself in North America and Europe — made the folk song the default, and with tens of millions of copies behind it, the Game Boy Tetris did more than anything else to fix a nineteenth-century Russian song in the heads of people who had never heard of it.
The Game Boy had a four-channel sound chip — two pulse waves, a programmable wave channel and noise — and Tanaka arranged folk, Baroque and Romantic music for it with the same care he gave his original work. Korobeiniki in particular was reshaped for the game: its tempo pushed forward and its melody set against a busy, bouncing bass line that gives it the momentum of falling blocks.
The choice of music is also a small statement about the game's origin. A puzzle designed in Moscow shipped with a Russian folk song and a Russian ballet, on a Japanese handheld, arranged by a Japanese composer, alongside a German keyboard suite — and it was the folk song that the world remembered.