Great Games: Tetris
NOTE: This piece was originally published in 2014 on Tetris’s 30th birthday.
Tetris, despite its age and simplicity, remains one of the best video games out there. Why is that? Well, the game is like chess, easy to learn, but difficult to manage. Tetris is a puzzle game, with shifting blocks which fall at a steady pace. The key is to arrange all the blocks, or “tetrominos” (a neologism of “tetris” and “domino”), in a horizontal row, from one end of the screen to the other. Once this happens, the tetrominos in these rows vanish, leaving other still unconnected blocks above them. The goal is to keep shaving off rows before the screen crowds up with blocks. The game is, for lack of a better word, addicting. A many good hours of my life have been wasted on this game and I don’t regret a single one.
With all that time being spent, I can’t quite confess to being a good Tetris player. I may lose quickly, but my enjoyment with the game has not diminished. It requires some thought, but not as much as chess, so the pace of the game can go relatively fast. Aesthetically, there’s a certain look to Tetris that can produce some really neat shapes, and a part of my brain is always stimulated when I try to fit the tetrominos together properly.
Unlike most of our favorite games, Tetris did not come from Japan, but from Soviet Russia. Business Insider says that scientist Alexey Pajitnov developed Tetris in 1984 on an Electronica 60 terminal computer while working at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In 1985, it was ported to the IBM PC and became popular all across the Soviet Union, before inevitable catching fire in the United States and Europe. This when the tenuous legal history of Tetris began to unfold. At the time, several companies claimed to have the rights for Tetris, and were distributing the game to various consoles. This menagerie in licensing was settled when the Soviet Union decided that Atari should have rights to the arcade version, while Nintendo would hold console versions. Nintendo and Atari, however, sued each other over the game with Nintendo coming out victorious. Henk Rogers had helped develop the game for Nintendo, he discovered it in 1988 at a Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. Tetris was bundled with the original Game Boy, and sold more than 35 million copies. Today, the game has been released on more than 50 platforms, translated into more than 50 languages, played in more than 185 countries, and sold at least 170 million copies. Pajitnov has said of making the game that, “I had no idea that it would turn out to be such a global success.”
What fascinates me the most about Tetris is that it was created by a scientist, not some college student killing free time on his computer. One of the great video games of all time has hailed from the halls of academia. To me, video games seem like an inevitable result of computer technology. That our understanding of electronics has come so far that we can create games out of them, is amazing, and challenging puzzle games like Tetris are excellent examples of that skill. Sure, video games have come a long way since 1984, but I think that there are few as accessible and mind-bending as Tetris. In another 30 years from now, I bet, people will still be ever as addicted, and ever frustrated when the blocks overload the screen.
Originally published at http://sansuthecat.blogspot.com.
