Does the original Game Boy game "Tetris" have a battery memory inside the cartridge?
When I was a kid, I traded my NES for a Game Boy with a sketchy kid in school. He essentially scammed me into believing that I was gonna get tons of games, but when we got home to my house, he just pulled up two pirate cartridges from China, each loaded with a bunch of random games (and many duplicates), selectable in a list upon boot. (I did not grasp the concept of piracy whatsoever at that age.)
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that I never owned the actual Tetris cartridge, so I'm unsure if my copy is identical in function to the original game. I have tried for a longer time now to find this information online, without any luck.
What made me start thinking about this is the fact that while the game allows you to enter three hi-score names for each difficulty setting, they are all erased as soon as I shut down the Game Boy. I believe that whoever made the pirate carts sometime in the early 1990s must have picked titles which don't require saving/loading (and thus a battery), but the fact that Tetris has such a "hi-score table" feature makes me wonder if the game is expecting a battery inside the cartridge after all.
It seems ridiculous to me to enter your name and then have it only last until the next time you turn the Game Boy off. I basically refuse to believe that this was the intention by Nintendo, but I'm not at all sure. They could have had the mentality that "games are supposed to have hi-score tables" or something. Or maybe they thought that all the kids playing for hi-score will want the winner to only have the "trophy" until the next recess? Nintendo saving a little money on each cartridge?
My honest best guess is that yes, the game did have a battery memory, and my pirate copy author simply didn't care about this or maybe didn't realize it? I doubt they modified any of the game ROMs. (Although that seems like it would freeze/hang when trying to save to the nonexistent battery memory...)
Would love to finally be able to put this to rest.
Best Answer
The answer is no. As you can see from this page (and in the picture below), which shows the internals of the game boy Tetris cartridge, there's no battery inside, so the game doesn't have any kind of battery backup.
Pictures about "Does the original Game Boy game "Tetris" have a battery memory inside the cartridge?"
Do Game Boy game cartridges have batteries?
Most Game Boy cartridges that allow games to be saved contain a small internal battery to store your save states. Over time, this battery degrades and needs replacement.Are Game Boy games saved on the cartridge?
Many game boy games save the files on the cartridge. The cartridge is able to save games because of the battery inside every cartridge. If the battery inside the cartridge dies, the gameboy board will not have the ability to save or overwrite a saved file. This is something that upset quite a few gamers.What Game Boy games have batteries?
GBA games that require batteriesGameReasonDragon Ball Z: Collectible Card GameSavesF-Zero: Maximum VelocitySavesHamtaro: Ham-Ham HeartbreakSavesKirby: Nightmare in Dream Land (Only some use a battery)Saves26 more rows•Aug 3, 2020How long does a Game Boy cartridge battery last?
The battery will eventually run out, but it can take several years. Nintendo set the original Gameboy Advance battery lifespan to around 15-20 years, which was 30 years ago. A Gameboy Advance game that is still active today possibly has a few years until it dies.The hunt for the FIRST Tetris!
More answers regarding does the original Game Boy game "Tetris" have a battery memory inside the cartridge?
Answer 2
The original 'Game Boy' version of Tetris released in 1989, did not have battery backup.
However, the updated version for the Game Boy Color, Tetris DX (released in 1998/99), is backwards-compatible with the original Game Boy, and does feature battery backed high-scores:
developed by Nintendo and released in Japan on October 21, 1998, in North America on November 18, 1998, and in Europe and Australia in 1999. Tetris DX features battery-saved high scores and three player profiles...
Tetris (Game Boy) - Wikipedia
Answer 3
My Japanese copy erases it every time i turn it off, not sure about the PAL and NA versions though.
Answer 4
The original game boy tetris did not have any save support. The later "DX" version did have save support.
High score tables that did not save were a pretty normal thing in the 80s. Many games started their life in amusement arcades, in this environment a volatile high-score table made some sense. The machine would likely be played by many people between power-cycles and the arcade operator probablly did not want the high scores to be permanent as they would gradually become virtually unbeatable.
For a home port of the game, a volatile high-score table makes a lot less sense, but nevertheless they persisted. In the home computer case it was probablly because games were usually stored on cassette and saving high-scores back to cassette would be more trouble than it was worth. In the console case this was presumablly for cost reasons. A basic game boy cart was literally just a rom on a PCB, a cart with save support would have to additionally add a ram chip and a battery.
It seems very likely that the games on your pirate cart were indeed chosen for their simplicitly, both in terms of not needing save ram, but also in terms of overall size and not needing a mapper chip.
Sources: Stack Exchange - This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Exchange and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Images: Monstera, Ketut Subiyanto, Monstera, Ketut Subiyanto