August 7, 2026
Block party at bridge club
The BBC Tetris Companion
A wildly overpriced old bridge gadget just got turned into Tetris, and commenters are obsessed
TLDR: A hobbyist turned the obscure BBC Bridge Companion, a pricey 1980s machine built to teach bridge, into a Tetris-like game. Commenters were split between delight at the wonderfully silly hack and disbelief that such an expensive one-trick gadget ever existed in the first place.
An ancient TV gadget made to teach people bridge — the card game your grandparents may have argued over — has suddenly become internet-famous for an entirely different reason: someone decided to cram a Tetris-style game onto it, purely because the machine was too weird to ignore. The device, the BBC Bridge Companion, originally launched in the mid-1980s with a jaw-dropping price tag, and that alone sent the comment section into a spiral. One reader gasped that it was basically more expensive than a PlayStation 5 in today’s money, which instantly turned the whole story from niche retro-computing to "wait, they charged WHAT?" drama.
And honestly, the community was living for the absurdity. One camp was delighted by the sheer chaos of it all — calling it an "odd bit of history" and praising the project as exactly the kind of gloriously unnecessary internet madness they want more of. Another camp got stuck on the timeline and started side-eyeing the machine’s existence at all, wondering how this thing could still be showing up so late, in a world that already had more general-purpose computers and even DOOM out there. There was also a mini-mystery energy in the replies, with people asking if anyone has made an emulator yet, because of course the first response to obscure old hardware is now: can we run it somewhere else?
The funniest vibe here is that nobody seems mad about the hack — they’re mad that this bizarre, expensive single-purpose box ever existed, and thrilled that it has finally been given a second life doing something people actually recognize.
Key Points
- •The article introduces Bridgetris, a Tetris-like homebrew game being developed for the BBC Bridge Companion.
- •The BBC Bridge Companion is described as a 1985 BBC-branded console designed to teach bridge via television and sold software on ROM cartridges.
- •According to the article, the console reportedly cost £200 at launch, and only nine software releases were identified, with Bridge Builder included as a pack-in.
- •The hardware uses a Z80 CPU, a TI TMS9129 video display processor, and 16kB of VRAM, which the author compares to ColecoVision-class 8-bit capability.
- •The author chose a Tetris-like design because it fits the console’s awkward controls and broad familiarity, while distinguishing the project from licensed Tetris by naming it Bridgetris.