Games

The Tetris games no one remembers

On the 30th anniversary of Tetris, we look at the spin-offs that didn't leave a lasting legacy.

Written by Chris Scullion

5 min readPublished on 17.10.2025 · 09:39 UTC

Tetris

Welltris (PC: 1989)

Hatris (1990: NES, Game Boy)

A screenshot of Hatris — Hatris
© [unknown]

Welltris was just the first of a series of games that seemingly plucked random words out of the air and put 'tris' after them. The next was Hatris, a puzzle game that – you guessed it – had you stacking hats instead of blocks. It actually had more in common with colour-matching games like Columns because you had to make sure specific hats were stacked on top of each other to clear them. The twist was that each hat was a different size, adding an extra layer of strategy: you could stack loads of small bowler hats on top of each other without worrying about reaching the top of the screen, but throw in just a couple of top hats and you were in trouble.

Faces... Tris 3 (1991: Amiga, MS DOS)

A screenshot of Faces... Tris 3 — Faces... Tris 3
© [unknown]

Giving up on the whole 'tris' naming scheme almost as soon as it had begun, Faces (not Facetris) had a similar idea to Hatris but took it a stage further. Instead of stacking items of the same type together, players had to place specific face parts on top of each other in order to make a face. If you successfully managed to stack a chin, mouth, nose, eyes and forehead, the face would be complete and would disappear, with extra points given for stacking all the features from a single person's face. It was a fine idea in theory but, because it was much more difficult than other Tetris games, most people lost patience with it fairly quickly. We suppose you could say they couldn't face it. Sorry.

Wordtris (1991: PC, SNES, Game Boy)

A screenshot of Wordtris — Wordtris
© [unknown]

By this point you can probably work out what this game is about before we even tell you. Still, for those not sure what Wordtris entails, it involves dropping letters into the playing field and trying to use them to spell out words, which in turn would make them disappear from the well. Naturally, the bigger the word the more points you'd get and you'd also get bonus points for spelling out specific words. Wordtris was perhaps a little too complicated for its own good but years later, another game called Bookworm borrowed the same general idea and applied it to a 'match three' style control method instead. The game was a success, and all was right with the world.