Hatris: Tetris with Hats!
The official launch slogan for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985 was “Now You’re Playing With Power”. In just five short years that slogan was quickly updated to: “Now You’re Still Playing With Power, But The Power Has A Hat On”. (Previous sentence has been disputed).
Hatris was made by the creators of Tetris: Alexey Pajitnov & Vladimir Pokhilko. They included a very sweet note in the Hatris Instruction Manual:
A Message From The Authors
Hello, everybody. How did you like Tetris? We feel that those of you who have played Tetris have gotten a glimpse of life in Russia through this unique, peaceful game.
But now, let’s talk about our new game. Hatris is very simple and easy to understand, but it also challenges your judgement and skill. We love Hatris. As we worked on the game, it was easy to imagine the people of the world and their characteristic hats.
If you like this game too, we’ll be glad to have even more friends in the U.S.
Enjoy and good luck!
I was fully prepared to write a quaint little segment about how funny it is that the creators of Tetris made a version of Tetris that was slightly different, but with hats. I was just going to write based on my memory of Hatris, but since I do own it I figured it would be worth it to play for a few minutes and confirm my hypothesis. This decision took me on a week long roller coaster ride that includes Frankenstein’s Monster, digging through old boxes, and then finally to murder-suicide.
My own personal journey with Hatris started in 1996-1997, my freshman year in college. I purchased the used game from the Ice House gas station in Kirksville, Missouri for I’m guessing a small sum of money. This was back in the days when physical media was still very popular, and just about every business had a small section to rent movies and games. This particular Ice House was between my dormitory and the Domino’s Pizza that had amazing deals after 11pm on weeknights. This Domino’s Pizza got a lot of use since we tried to eat dinner as early as possible (4:30pm) at the dining hall so that we were able to get an additional meal in (Wow could the freshman 15 be real after all?!?). Why did I decide to buy Hatris? Not sure, but I am an unabashed lover of puzzle games. To this day Tetris, and Dr. Mario are two of my favorite games of any genre.
If memory serves, I played Hatris sporadically in college, then each time I moved and set up my Nintendo I recall popping it in to play for a few minutes. This week in February of 2021 I played using my Retron 5 which allows you to play Nintendo games with an HDMI hookup, and it looks great.
At face value the gameplay is very simple:
Six heads at the bottom of the screen (all ready to receive hat(s))
A pair of hats drop from the top of the screen
Five of the same type of hat stacked together clear the hats, and award you points
Honestly before this week I’m not sure if I even played the game beyond the rules above. However, this game can get a lot more complex, and a lot more fun! Here’s why:
Once one of your hats hits another hat, you can break the other hat off of the pair and move to a different head. This is assuming there is a spot lower in the playing field for your second hat.
You can press B, and summon one of your two assistants to help you! One assistant will remove hats from the bottom of a column, and the other assistant will swap one column for another.
The music, while not iconic like Tetris music, is still very enjoyable and catchy.
The heads change! Ok this does not sound that exciting, but the head selection is so strange that it makes me smile just thinking about it. When you begin the first head looks to be a russian fellow (possibly one of the assistants), but as you move through the game the heads can change to be Charlie Chaplin, possibly Laurel and/or Hardy, Dracula, and Frankenstein’s monster!
Let’s circle back to Alexey Pajitnov & Vladimir Pokhilko. Again thanks to the Hatris Instruction Manual which I still have, you also learn that Alexey and Vladimir are the two assistants you see on the screen throughout the whole game. The combination of their sugar coated message at the beginning, and their presence on screen I decided to do a little more research on these two. This is where I discovered that Hatris is drenched in tragedy.
The less extreme example of tragedy would be surrounding Alexey Pajitnov. By all accounts he made some great games, and had a successful life & career. There were some uninformed business decisions that caused fights over licensing rights, but eventually he started making good money from Tetris after moving to the U.S. & gaining the rights to Tetris. Additionally his adult son Dmitri tragically died in a skiing accident in 2017.
Then we shift to Vladimir Pokhilko….. He is listed as the co-developer of Tetris & Hatris, and was a clinical psychologist. Vladimir’s work as a psychologist often saw him using puzzles as tests, and this included Tetris! While Vladimir also moved to the U.S. to attempt to further his career in gaming things started to turn bad. Reportedly his company was having financial difficulties, and most sources believe this greatly influenced what happened in 1998. Vladimir murdered his wife Elena and young son Peter, and then committed suicide by slitting his own throat. He left a suicide note that said:
“I’ve been eaten alive. Vladimir. Just remember that I am exist. The davil.” [sic]
Yikes. I certainly did not expect this brief Hatris exploration to end up where it did, but sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. I am still enjoying Hatris, but it is hard to get over the fact that one of the cartoon assistants on screen at all times is a cold blooded murderer.
