Tetsuya Mizuguchi, and his team at Q Entertainment, couldn't land the licence for Tetris back in the early noughties, and it's thanks to this twist of fate that we now have Lumines.
The two series have been somewhat intertwined in the years since; Mizuguchi eventually got to make his take on the Russian puzzler with the celebrated Tetris Effect, which borrows heavily from the Lumines playbook.
Now, Lumines is on the cusp of a comeback in the form of Lumines Arise, which in turn is inspired by what was achieved in Enhance's excellent Tetris title.
It's an interesting back-and-forth, isn't it? Well, we brought it up with Mizuguchi himself, as part of our broader interview about Lumines Arise, and he provided his thoughts on how the cards have fallen over the years.
"The PSP arrived, and as you mention, the [Tetris licence] was unavailable, and that's that," says Mizuguchi, adding that all new creations have a backstory, and that Lumines wouldn't exist had that not happened.
More than that, he seems pleased it worked out the way it did, because he thinks his team's relative lack of experience at the time could've led to a less-than-stellar Tetris game:
Thanks to that instance, Lumines was born. Because we went through that process, we were able to work on our own synesthesia-based game design, honing our own skills and carving out a niche for ourselves.
Why I say that is because, if we actually were able to land a deal with the PSP to work on a Tetris game, I'll be honest, I don't know if I have the confidence to say we would've made the best PSP Tetris game at that time.
Being denied the chance to work on Tetris forced Mizuguchi and co. to find an alternative way forward.
"It's only due to the fact we went through our own path and made Lumines, and almost proved to people you can make a feel-good game on a handheld by just dropping blocks and it's synchronised to the music," Mizuguchi says.
"Taking that experience and injecting it back into Tetris Effect, it's only thanks to our experience making Lumines."
It's funny to think of Mizuguchi's lack of confidence in his younger self because, while he didn't get to make that PSP Tetris title, he and his team instead made Lumines, which is among the handheld's best games.
It also makes us wonder what his Tetris game would've looked like on PSP; would it have essentially been a lo-fi Tetris Effect? Perhaps for that game to truly shine, it needed to happen years later with more advanced tech.
Anyway, we're very glad that both Tetris and Lumines exist, and that they're both getting gorgeous reinventions from Enhance.