Coincidentally (considering my recent post about Daleks Forever), I wrote a Tetris clone myself, named Cumulonimbus. Most of my software had ridiculous names, so it is somewhat surprising that the game did as well as it did. The first version was basically an overnighter written in 1990 for B/W macs using Think Pascal. With an asking price of only $1 and better gameplay and audio/video than the other clones available at the time, it gathered a good enough following to justify a new version in 1991 written using Think C. I didn't have access to a color Mac until years later, so adding color support was frustrating and by the time I got that working OK I got busy at school and never had time to work on it again. Nevertheless, upon release of version 2.0 in January 1991 I was firmly convinced my game was the most fun and best overall version of Tetris available for the Mac. (Fun Fact: I didn't play the real Tetris myself until years later; it was written based on what a friend described.)



My game was aimed at a windowed (i.e. not full screen) environment, so you could click out to a real application if the Boss game by. I also believe there were a few innovations, such as: allowing the player to resize the well, select the pieces to use (including a few other shapes not in the original game), starting the game with pre-placed obstacle bricks, rotating the zig-zag brick into the flipside conformations, and maybe even the concept of levels.

Apparently more advanced clones came along but at the time it was good enough to earn money for pizzas so I didn't have to eat dorm food every day!