The Taiwanese Arcade where Tetris is King

(Thanks to Shinichi on our Facebook page for the tip!)

Any good restaurant has a signature dish that attracts locals in to enjoy it and in turn they give patronage to that restaurant, usually coming back for more. In arcades, we sort of have the same thing, when it comes to games we offer that are hard to find or others simply don’t have. People come out constantly to play the same game, although what that is exactly often depends upon local tastes.

As we see in this story from RocketNews24.com, a Japanese news website, in March of this year they took a look at a small street arcade at a Taipei night market that has it’s own “signature game” that locals enjoy so much it draws small crowds. And that just so happens to be Tetris by Sega (1988, thanks Sgt. Wafer) ~~The Grandmaster~~~~(update: well, make that a TGM clone of some kind from the looks of it). If you are unfamiliar with this version of Tetris, think of it as Tetris for expert players.~~ It’s actually more impressive that everyone is attracted by an older version of Tetris than the newer TGM series. What they have setup at this particular arcade is just a game board inside of a small weathered cabinet that just has a television monitor sitting on top of it, which isn’t much to look at but is good enough to keep people interested. It makes you wonder how they would react to having Sega’s Giant Tetris on hand. Here’s a video below showing the attention this game alone attracts, although they do happen to have some other titles around like The King of Fighters. As Shinichi points out, one great thing about this video is you see people of all ages being attracted to the games.

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