Time Magazine reports that thirty years ago, a little game about dropping geometrically strange thingamajigs originally clusters of punctuation marks into neat, lookalike rows kicked off on a wild journey that led it out of a metamorphosing Soviet Union to the United States. That game, dubbed Tetris after the Greek word for the number four, is today one of the most popular video games of all time going from "blockbuster" sales of 2 million already by 1988 to over 425 million paid mobile downloads today. "I never imagined Tetris was going to be this successful," says creator Alexey Pajitnov. "The simple, yet addicting nature of Tetris still has me playing it a few times every week. I meet fans from around the world who are also as passionate about Tetris as me, and there is no doubt in my mind Tetris will continue to expand and bring its classic appeal to new players in new ways and on new devices, whatever they may be."
Peter Hartlaub says that the problem with writing a tribute to "Tetris" is that there are no great moments associated with it which is pretty much the point of the game. It's about taking the player out of the moment, and into a sort of high-functioning intellectual limbo. "Tetris isn't about letting your mind wander to a different world: It's about shutting it down altogether," says Hartlaub. "It creates almost a meditative state. The DNA of Tetris, still popular in its own right, is evident in some of the most popular games in 2014, including the equally escapist "Bejeweled" and "Candy Crush Saga." Tetris perfected downtime, and this was no small thing. In defending my role as pop culture critic, I often try to explain that there's honor in making someone's BART commute seem to go by more quickly. Some of us create fine art, others craft a way to pass the time."
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Despite creating one of the most recognizable video games of all time, Tetris creators Alexey Pajitnov (who first coded the game in Russia) and Henk Rogers (who was instrumental in bringing the game to prominence in the West) have not been all that recognizable to the general public. That has started to change, though, with the recent release of Apple TV's Tetris movie, which dramatizes the real-life story of the pair's unlikely friendship and business partnership.
In Ars Technica's latest Unsolved Mysteries video, Pajitnov and Rogers went all the way back to the game's earliest origins. That includes the origin of "the Tetris song," aka Korobeiniki, which Game Boy Tetris fans have had stuck in their heads for decades now.
Related:
Happy 30th Birthday Tetris! 20140608
Most Addictive Game Since Tetris Released 20140318
Multiple sites are reporting on 13-year-old Tetris player, Willis Gibson, also known as Blue Scuti, who played until the NES version gave out. New play methods, such as rolling and hypertapping, were needed to reach a skill level where one can play as long as endurance and the software hold out. In his case it took over half an hour on the NES using rolling:
Blue Scuti is a Tetris prodigy who employs the "rolling" controller technique, a new way of holding and using the NES controller that was popularized in 2021. Rolling surpassed "hyper tapping," which requires players to tap the controller's D-pad 12 times per second, as the fastest and best way of playing Tetris. Rolling is a method where players roll their fingers on the bottom of an NES controller and use that pressure to push the controller into their other hand, which presses the D-pad to move the blocks. With rolling, players can push the D-pad at least 20 times per second, which is fast enough to theoretically play the game until it breaks. The technique has completely revolutionized competitive Tetris over the last few years.
Also at Tom's Hardware, Tetris was finally beaten after 34 years, game kill screen pops up at Level 157 — hypertapping and rolling were key techniques and the BBC, Tetris: How a US teenager achieved the 'impossible' and what his feat tells us about human capabilities.
Previously:
(2023) Hackers' Delight: a History of MIT Pranks and Hacks
(2023) Tetris' Creators Reveal the Game's Greatest Unsolved Mysteries
(2021) Tetris is no Longer Just a Game, but an Algorithm that Ensures Maximum Hotel Room Occupancy
(2014) Happy 30th Birthday Tetris!
(Score: 1) by My Silly Name on Sunday June 08 2014, @02:20PM
Hmmm. Has anyone actually ever paid for Tetris? I always thought it was pretty much in the same ballpark as wump.
Anyway, I still prefer Rodents' Revenge... :)
(Score: 2) by TrumpetPower! on Sunday June 08 2014, @02:32PM
...here it is implemented in HTML 5:
http://mrcoles.com/tetris/ [mrcoles.com]
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 1) by stephenw32768 on Sunday June 08 2014, @03:32PM
...Tetris plays you!
Yeah, it's a lame meme; but it's also the title of this fantastic tribute to the well-known music: http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02457 [ocremix.org]
-Stephen (not associated with OC ReMix, other than being a fan)
(Score: 1) by looorg on Sunday June 08 2014, @05:22PM
Just imagine all the hours of productivity that have gone down the tubes due to this one little, amazing, game. But I'm sure it must have given something back to in the way of relaxation and new ideas.
(Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Sunday June 08 2014, @05:35PM
alright, whose looked at two parked cars and thought how nicely one of those T shaped blocks would fit?
(Score: 1) by legont on Sunday June 08 2014, @07:38PM
http://rt.com/news/164360-soviet-tetris-30-anniversary/ [rt.com]
The excuse for the design was hardware testing.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 08 2014, @08:16PM
we should use this space to list the tetris games we like most, right?
(please include computer/operatingsystem in the info)
Also how many tetris games have you made?
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Sunday June 08 2014, @10:47PM
Hilariously enough I don't even really like Tetris. I wrote an implementation on two different occasions anyway. It's just that much of a "hrm. I feel like writing a game" project and is a big part of its legacy without a doubt.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 08 2014, @11:36PM
I think one of my favorites was supertetris for dos
I like how it pushes the levels prefilled blocks up
Personally I only made two very simple tetrises
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Monday June 09 2014, @09:40AM
Great, now that it's back in the lime light again, hollywood is going to make a "blockbuster" movie about it.
(Score: 2) by bugamn on Tuesday June 10 2014, @02:13AM
Something like this [youtube.com]? Or would you rather have this one [youtube.com]?