Dr. Mario

Dr. Mario
Developer(s)	Nintendo
Publisher(s)	Nintendo
Platform(s)	NES, Arcade, Game Boy, Super NES, N64, GameCube (Japan only), GBA, Wii
Release	1990 (NES/GB)
Gameplay info
Next pieces	1
Playfield size	8w x 11–16h
Hold piece	no
Hard drop	no

Dr. Mario is a non-tetromino puzzle game franchise developed by Nintendo and released on its systems.

The bottle is 8 blocks wide by 11 to 16 blocks high (depending on version) and starts out partially full of "viruses", or fixed blocks of the color red, yellow, or blue.

Pieces in Dr. Mario are vitamin pills with two halves (making them dominoes), with each half colored red, yellow, or blue. The player can move or rotate them as they fall into the bottom. Once a pill locks, if four or more blocks of a color are aligned horizontally or vertically, they are removed, and the pill segments above them (but not viruses) fall in a cascade. In 2-player, cascades cause garbage pill segments to drop into the opponent's playfield. Anything that falls falls slowly, at a rate of 4 rows per second, due to the design of the playfield refresh logic. Modern versions allow players to speed up the fall rate of these cascades in single-player, but not in multiplayer, where the time lost waiting for garbage segments to fall is often more damaging than the segments themselves.

Players who like Dr. Mario may also like Columns, Klax, and Puyo Pop. The game Tetris 2 can be thought of as Dr. Mario with tetrominoes.

Rotation system

Ordinarily, the pills rotate within a 2x2 box whose bottom left corner is always filled. Clockwise rotation looks like this:

Wall kicks on Dr. Mario (NES), WarioWare Inc.: Mega Microgame$ (GBA), and Dr. Mario & Puzzle League (GBA) are as follows:

Horizontal to vertical:

	No kick here

Vertical to horizontal:

	Kick left
	No kick here

Tetris & Dr. Mario has some additional wall kicks from horizontal to vertical:

	Kick right
	Kick down
	Kick down+right
	Fail