DadHacker

Yesterday I saw on the blog of Jason Scott, (creator of “BBS: The Documentary,” a topic near to my heart, having been a sysop and having had a FidoNet address back in the early 90s) a link to another interesting blog.

Called DadHacker, it covers a wide variety of topics being, well, a blog.

And while the randomness of people’s writing whims do not always lead to a good read, this site is worth a peek.

I even found an entry on MMORPGs.

But the gems in this blog are the entries about the authors days at Atari. Posts like, “Donkey Kong and Me,” “Super Pac-Man,” and “The Atari ST” (part 1 and part 2).

If you like this sort of computer ancient history, go take a look.

Where is Tetris for the DS?

My daughter has had her Nintendo DS for two months now, and I have had my own for a little over a month.

We have been mostly about Pokemon over that time, with some side trips into Horsez 2 and Mario Party DS.

And while I like Pokemon quite a bit, it isn’t really a game to pick up and play frantically for a bit then set aside. It has something of an MMO vibe to it in that there is always something to do, places to travel, people to find, and often, just work to be done. That is good, in that it keeps me coming back, but sometimes you want the a game with no long-term commitment.

I have also fooled around with BrainAge a bit (current age: 33), but sometimes I don’t feel inclined to exercise my pre-frontal cortex by doing math problems or memorizing four letter words.

I went to GameFly to see what games I might put in our queue to scratch that gaming itch.

And, digging through the lists of games, I found Tetris DS.

Now there was a game that seemed worth having.

I was going to put it on the list, but then decided I to just go buy it.

After all, when have I ever been disappointed by Tetris?

I had a copy of Tetris on my Mac SE back in the days when a 9″ monochrome monitor seemed cool and have had versions of the game on a number of different platforms SINCE.

So I started looking around for it when I was out and about.

It wasn’t on the shelf at Fry’s.

No luck at BestBuy.

Strike out at GameStop.

Negative at Toys R Us.

Deciding to get serious, and armed with a gift certificate, I went to Amazon to order it and be done.

And Amazon did not have it. They only had “other ordering options” listed, with copies starting at $48.

Has this edition of Tetris been discontinued?

It is still listed on the official Nintendo DS site.

It even has its own official web site.

The Wikipedia entry on it does not have any details, other than to say that it seems to be oddly hard to obtain in some regions.

Then I went to eBay, to see how the used market was going. Searching on Tetris DS brought up the usual eBay assortment of results. The best of the “not quite what I wanted” entries was this one:

Good luck with that sale.

Filtering out the odd, actual copies of Tetris DS seem to be going for above retail on eBay.

Which brings me back to my question: What became of Tetris DS?

I cannot imagine that it was so unpopular that it would have been dropped. The demand on eBay is keeping the price up such that one might have been better off investing in copies of Tetris DS as opposed to, say, CitiBank.

Who knows the story? What is the mystery behind the lack of Tetris DS?