is a senior reporter who’s been covering and reviewing the latest gadgets and tech since 2006, but has loved all things electronic since he was a kid.
Tetris has been immortalized in a playable McDonald’s plastic chicken nugget, a playable fake 7-Eleven Slurpee cup, and a playable wristwatch. But the most intriguing way to play Tetris yet is encased in paper.
Last year the Tetris Company partnered with Red Bull for a gaming tournament that culminated in the 150-meter-tall Dubai Frame landmark being turned into the world’s largest playable Tetris installation using over 2,000 drones that functioned as pixels. Although the timing was a coincidence, Red Bull also published a 180-page gaming edition of its The Red Bulletin lifestyle magazine around the same time as the event, with a limited number of copies wrapped in a less grandiose, but no less technically impressive, version of Alexey Pajitnov’s iconic puzzle game.
To create a playable gaming magazine, Red Bull Media House (the company’s media wing) enlisted the help of Kevin Bates, who in 2014 wowed the internet by creating an ultra-thin Tetris-playing business card. In 2015, he launched the $39 Arduboy, a credit card-sized, open-source handheld that attracted a thriving community of developers. Over the course of a decade, Bates also created a pair of equally pocketable Tetris-playing handhelds that cost less than $30, and the shrunken-down USB-C Arduboy Mini.
The GamePop GP-1 Playable Magazine System (as it’s officially called) is the latest evolution of Bates’ mission to use existing, accessible, and affordable technologies to reimagine what a portable gaming device can be. It took “most of last year” to develop, Bates revealed during a call with The Verge. He wouldn’t divulge the exact details of how his collaboration with Red Bull came to be. But if you’re looking to make an officially licensed version of Tetris that’s thin enough to flex, Bates has the experience, and he shared with us some of the technical details that make this creation work.
The game’s screen is made up of 180 tiny RGB LEDs on a custom circuit board that can flex and bend.
While OLED display technology has given us tablet-sized devices that fold into smartphones, they’re still expensive and fragile. To make a display that can survive being embedded in a flexible magazine cover without reinforcement, Bates created a custom matrix of 180 2mm RGB LEDs mounted to a flexible circuit board just 0.1mm thick. While the display and coin-cell batteries make it thicker in a few places — nearly 5mm at its thickest point — you genuinely feel like you’re playing a handheld made of paper. The flexible circuits are bonded between two sheets of paper to create the sleeve that wraps around the book-sized magazine, and it feels satisfyingly thin and flexible.
Flexible circuits aren’t a new idea. They’ve been used in electronics for decades. You can find them in flip phones old enough they now feel like antiques, and nearly every laptop. They’re also frequently used to miniaturize devices that don’t fold or flex at all, connecting internal components where space is extremely limited. But it’s only in the past five or six years that the technology has become available to smaller makers, and Bates says he’s been “messing around with the flexible circuits for about as much time.” This collaboration was an opportunity to use what he’s learned to create a device that would live outside his workshop.
The GamePop GP-1’s display resolution pales in comparison to the OLED screens used in folding phones, but Bates’ creation is far more durable. The game has not only undergone the typical safety tests, but Bates even “hit it with a hammer a few times” to test its durability. His display survived, but don’t try that with a folding phone. They’re still far less durable.
To keep it as thin as possible, the Tetris game uses embedded touch sensors instead of physical buttons.
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