Bikaka

Bikaka is a Tetris variant for the classic Macintosh by Swedish game author Ingemar Ragnemalm, who released a long line of small Mac arcade titles in the 1990s. Instead of the familiar square grid, Bikaka drops its falling pieces onto a hexagonal playfield, which changes both the shape vocabulary and the strategy.

The hex twist

Pieces are built from hexagons rather than squares, and the well itself is a hex grid. Lines clear along the diagonals natural to that geometry, so players have to retrain their Tetris reflexes for a board where every cell has six neighbours instead of four.

Sound and hardware

The 1.4 release adds music, but the music only plays on a 68020 or better Macintosh. The author notes that on a Classic-class machine you should turn the music off for acceptable performance.

Release

Bikaka 1.4 was posted to Info-Mac in June 1995 from Linkoping University. It is a small shareware-style download distributed as a StuffIt archive (bikaka10.sit in the Info-Mac games tree).

Author

Ingemar Ragnemalm is well known on the classic Mac scene for a steady output of compact, experiment-friendly games and for his programming books and tutorials in the same era.