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Tetris in Minecraft: the most beautiful, complicated way of doing something simple

tetmin

We all know games are complicated things, but it’s not until I see the workings rendered in Redstone that I appreciate just how complicated. Tetris in Minecraft puts the player in a small room with a few switches on the wall to start and stop a game of Tetris. The position of the falling blocks is changed by floor pressure pads, and the game is viewed on a map you hold. That’s brilliant, but even then it’s only 1/10th of this build’s charm.

Like an iceberg, the rest is below the surface: a beautiful contraption of Redstone switches, the innate beauty of technology made huge. So big you could house a group of Minecraft players in there, if it was on a server. The shadows are dark enough for a terrifying multitude of monsters to spawn in the circuits: if the machine breaks down, it’s probably because an Enderman has grabbed a block, or a Creeper as exploded.

All that and it’s a decent representation of the full game. It has: “Rotation, Shifting, SoftDrop, Line completion, Score, Random blocks”. Builders, The Redstone Development Foundation, have generously released the map if you want to try it out. Grab it here.