It is a portable version of Alexey Pajitnov's original Tetris and it was bundled with the North American and European releases of the Game Boy itself.

The object of the game is to manipulate the tetrominoes by moving each one sideways and rotating it by 90-degree units with the aim of creating a horizontal line of blocks without gaps.

[6] The player may adjust the difficulty before beginning a game by selecting a starting level or choosing to pre-fill the play area with a given number of lines of randomly placed blocks.

This version of Tetris includes a two-player mode, in which each player's objective is to remain in play for longer than their opponent.

When a player scores a Double, Triple, or Tetris, incomplete rows of blocks are added to the bottom of the opponent's stack, causing it to rise.

In 1988, Pajitnov teamed with fellow Soviet Academy of Sciences researchers Dmitry Pavlovsky, and Vadim Gerasimov to create a new two-player version of Tetris that ran on PCs.

In 1988, Henk Rogers of Bullet-Proof Software noticed the US home computer version at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show in a Spectrum HoloByte booth.

Finding himself hooked to the game, he pursued the rights to publish Tetris in Japan, and secured licenses from both Spectrum HoloByte, who held the North American computer license, and Atari Games, which had produced the American arcade version under a sublicense from Mirrorsoft, which had the rights for the European computer market.

Requesting more time from Arakawa, he traveled to Moscow to speak with the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations's bureau for computer hardware and software export, called Elektronorgtechnica or ELORG, and Pajitnov.

[9] However, it was revealed that the Tetris property had not actually been licensed to anyone because Stein had secured the rights from Pajitnov directly and not from the Russian authority.

[12] Bullet-Proof Software is mentioned as a copyright holder and the sub-licensor of the Tetris handheld rights to Nintendo on the game's startup screen.

The victory fanfares played after completing levels are different arrangements of "Trepak", from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker.

[21] The Virtual Console version of Tetris was delisted in Europe from the Nintendo eShop after December 31, 2014[22] and in North America.

[23] The Game Boy version was released worldwide on the Nintendo Switch Online service on February 8, 2023.

The Game Boy Color version was released worldwide on the service on December 11, 2024 to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the series.