Inspiration
This is a mechanical homage to the classic and much loved video/arcade game, Tetris. I'm now the proud owner of a beautiful arcade machine from Bitcade, and my wife and I have been enjoying it very much. We've become a little addicted to Micro Machines and a Tetris-like game called Maniac Square. Having access to classic games and my general love for 80s/90s culture was certainly the catalyst for this project.

Styling
I've returned to my favourite materials, copper and wood, to revive a style that I'd used in some earlier projects. Rather than using plastics, I like the idea of using materials that would drive up the cost of production. This wouldn't be commercially viable (ignoring that it may not be technically feasible), but making this in 3D gives me the freedom to explore the aesthetic.

Hardware
This is the first project I'd created with my M1 Mac, and I wasn't disappointed. The compute power allowed me to quickly test materials, run the animation at the intended frame rate in the viewport without lagging and render times were significantly shorter. Previous animations I've made on older machines were generally around 200-400 frames in length, and would take many hours to render. This project used over 1200. Ok, so this still took a few hours…but the alternative would have been days.