The Tetris Company and the Japanese developer Arika have announced that they've reached an agreement for a new Tetris The Grand Master game.
The news was shared via an English and Japanese press release, published earlier today (September 27th), and states that the project will introduce new ideas based on the concept of "Tetris that makes [you] good at Tetris." Beyond that, very little else was revealed about the title, except that it is currently scheduled to be released during the fiscal year 2024, which is slated to end in March 2025.
Just to give a brief bit of history, Arika's Tetris The Grand Master was first released in arcades in 1998, with the goal of the project being to introduce a greater layer of difficulty and complexity to Sega's 1988 arcade version of Tetris that took Japan by storm.
Following the original release, Tetris The Grand Master later spawned two sequels Tetris: The Absolute – The Grand Master 2 (in 2000) and Tetris: The Grand Master 3 Terror‑Instinct (in 2008), as well as the console-exclusive Tetris: The Grand Master Ace, which was released for the Xbox 360.
In 2009, Arika generated excitement online when it announced that it was developing yet another sequel, set to be called Tetris: The Grand Master 4 The Masters of Round, for arcades. However, this project was cancelled just one year later, with its designer Ichiro Mihara claiming on his blog that the game had been abandoned due to the emergence of several overseas clones.
In the years since Arika has tried time again and again to get a new Tetris: The Grand Master game off the ground, but was seemingly unable to acquire the license, leading the company to temporarily rebrand the title as The Grandmaster 2015 before that project also went dark.
The last few years have shown some positive signs that a new Tetris The Grand Master game could finally be on the way after years of stop and starts.
First, there was the release of Tetris: The Grand Master and Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 on the Nintendo Switch eShop and PS4, as part of Arcade Archives. Then, earlier this month, the developer Arika added some fuel to the fire, teasing some Tetris-related news on social media (which we mistakenly suspected was related to an Arcade Archives reissue of Tetris: The Grand Master 3 - Terror Instinct), before mysteriously deleting the posts in question.
Now, it appears we finally have confirmation that a new Tetris game from Arika is finally on the way and that the relevant rights holders are all on board, meaning there's a good chance this project will succeed where the other attempts have failed.