It's a Game, Boy!

No clues yet.

We were playing a funky form of Tetris (specifically, the Game Boy version) this month!

Game 1: The practice round was meant to get you thinking about each block's letter equivalent. From left to right, the blocks spelled out SOLOIST. Nails made it a little tough to find the right answer here, but the idea was to think about the game's music composer, the famous Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka, a.k.a. CHIP TANAKA. It was these 10 letters that mattered for Game 2.

Game 2: The letters CHIPTANAKA required 2 separate manipulations (the order they are applied is immaterial). The blocks at the bottom were to be converted to letters: OTLZIOZITZ. Additionally, each column had an important empty square counting up row by row; the 1st empty space in Column 1, the 2nd empty space in Column 2, the 3rd empty space in Column 3, etc. This yields: 2, 6, 10, 13, 15, 15, 13, 10, 10, 17. The "sum" of each of these 10 characters, in order, results in: THECREATOR. Thus, the answer to Game 2 is ALEXEY PAJITNOV. It was these 14 letters that mattered for Game 3.

Game 3: Only one manipulation required here, but it wasn't an easy one to spot! Each row (up to #14) had empty squares, and adding up their "column value" (e.g., if only the 4th and 5th columns had empty squares in that row, that row's "value" was 4+5=9) resulted in: 1, 9, 4, 14, 25, 10, 24, 6, 18, 3, 21, 15, 22, 23. Manipulating ALEXEY PAJITNOV by these numbers resulted in BUILDINGBLOCKS. In the Tetris world, this means TETROMINOES (the most common spelling, though there are variations).

Adding up your three answers yielded the gibberish key: XYHFNMMPJOM, which when applied as a Vigenere to the given ciphertext KYTJBRFNYSM, resulted in: NAMEOFTYPEA. And since we've been talking Game Boy Tetris and Chip Tanaka this whole time, you might have now deduced that the "Type A" song from the game is based on the Russian folk song "Korobeiniki" (also known as "Korobushka") ... either response was good enough to bring it home this month!