My lifelong dream has been to decorate my house with furniture inspired by video games. In fact, I’ve imagined owning these very Tetris-themed shelves!
The designer of the Tetris shelves, Sharon Romang, made the furniture for a high school industrial design project. I think that alone gets a huge “wow” – these shelves look as if they were made by seasoned professionals, and they just fit so well together!
Tetris has been a highly influential game for many gamers ever since Alexey Pajitnov invented it in 1985. Your personal opinion may vary, but many consider it to be the best game ever made, for some very simple reasons: Tetris is addictive, easy to pick up, highly replayable, and easy to port to just about any device that has at least three buttons. I’m positive that I’m not the only one who has found themselves playing Tetris in their dreams!
Overall, the Tetris shelves are fantastic – the individual pieces can be combined any way you’d like, which means that the design possibilities are endless. The set consists of the quirky Z piece, the beloved T piece, and the infamous line piece. The line piece has been subdivided so that each square is a shelf, which is really useful if the unit is being used as a tower bookshelf.
The fourth piece is a bit of a wild card; one of its blocks is detached, so you can turn it into an L, T, or square. I think this was done on purpose, though perhaps the creator was only inspired by Tetris and wasn’t trying to be accurate. From an interior design standpoint, it’s probably easier to create a compelling design with smaller pieces rather than four-block Tetrominoes.
My only real point of contention is that the shelving units are plain white instead of the bright colours that have long been associated with Tetris. The shelves look really great against a white wall, but in front of any other color, they’re just not very striking. Even on the greyscale (or rather, pea-soup green scale) Game Boy, Tetrominoes have always been multi-toned or multi-colored.
The panels backing each square also don’t quite suit the Tetris theme – it looks like an attempt at sophisticating the design, but ends up looking kitschy. I’d personally like to see each one backed with scaled pixel art of actual Tetris pieces. Of course, both of these complaints are minor, and the overall design looks amazing despite them.
Tetris is a game that really lends itself to furniture, because it is incredibly iconic and distinct, yet very uncomplicated – the simple geometric shapes don’t need any extra work to look great as shelves. The classic game has inspired the Tetris chair, which is made entirely of actual 4-block tetrominoes, as well as the Tetris table, which looks like a perfectly combined solid brick of pieces, minus one tiny hole.
