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Seventeen Years of Tetris

Posted by michael on Sun Jul 14, 2002 10:57 PM
from the thumbs-hurt-just-thinking-about-it dept.
Entertainment Games
thefalconer writes "It all happened 17 years ago on a whim and an addiction of sorts. Alexey Pazhitnov created the one game that has caused so many people around the world to just about go nuts trying to win a game that has the ability to slowly drive you to insanity one small misshappen block at a time. Since the creation of the original Tetris game on an Electronica 60, there have been dozens of different incarnations of Tetris that have dazzled the eyes, boggled the mind, frustrated the emotions, and fried more than their fair share of braincells. There is also a very interesting history of tetris online that details its evolution from innocent game to insane addiction. Plus it's one of those games that never grows old. :D"
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[+] GDC To Honor Respected Game Figures 8 comments
Next Generation has the word that several respected games industry contributors will be receiving special awards at this years Game Developer's Choice Awards ceremony. Legendary designer Shigeru Miyamoto, Tetris's creator Alexey Pajitnov, indie-games guru Greg Costikyan, and 'The Fatman' (audio genius George Sanger) will all be given awards that 'reflect the dramatic impact of their visionary creations and industry work'. Pajitnov will be getting the 'First Penguin' award, for breaking new ground on the puzzle genre, while Costikyan will be given the 'Maverick' award for his work with the Manifesto Games label. Sanger will get the 'Community Contributions' nod for his pioneering work with music and sound, while Miyamoto will get a (much-deserved) Lifetime Achievement award for his numerous contributions to the industry via Nintendo. The GDCAs will be held on March 7th at the Game Developer's Conference.
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  • 17 years... (Score:4, Funny)

    by URoRRuRRR (57117) on Sunday July 14 2002, @10:59PM (#3883896) Journal
    17 years of Tetris, 17 years of those damn little Z shaped ones coming at the exact wrong time.

    • Re:17 years... (Score:5, Funny)

      by madcow_ucsb (222054) <slashdot2 AT sanks DOT net> on Sunday July 14 2002, @11:05PM (#3883926)
      ...and 17 years of NOT getting the long skinny one when you've filled the entire screen with blocks except for that one-block-wide stripe up the entire right-hand side because you *just knew* that the next one would be the skinny one...
      • I've heard dedicated players call the long skinny piece the "Tetris Penis." There's definitely something Freudian about the game, I think.
      • I used to play Tetris like that, until one day, in an arcade, a man who had been watching me wait for a certain piece said to me, "Tetris is not about making pretty patterns. It's about filling in the holes"

        After that, my scores went through the roof.

    • Not Z's, but squares (Score:4, Funny)

      by avoisin (105703) on Monday July 15 2002, @01:23AM (#3884310)
      I always had the biggest trouble with the square shaped pieces.

      They never seemed to be oriented right, so I had to keep rotating them.

      </dry humor>
  • Play javascript tetris online here [geocities.com].
  • It has been around MUCH longer than that. Just look! http://www.somethingawful.com/inserts/articlepics/ photoshop/classicart/protagonist_christris.jpg

  • The GameBoy's popularity... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonvmous Coward (589068) on Sunday July 14 2002, @11:06PM (#3883931)
    ...probably owes a lot to Tetris. When I worked at FuncoLand, Tetris was the most bought and sold game we had for that system. It just had this long-term appeal.

    My step mom interrupted my games all the time. The only time she ever apologized for it was when I was playing Tetris. That was the only game she'd play on it, so we finally came to an understanding. Heh.

    • Re:The GameBoy's popularity... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Russ Steffen (263) on Sunday July 14 2002, @11:34PM (#3884037) Homepage

      Oh dear god - the music from Gameboy Tetris. I hope there is special spot in hell reserved for the bastard that wrote that tune. One summer during college I worked at the factory that built all the Nintendo in-store displays. I must have built a couple of thousand of these couter top Gameboy displays. They had a modded Gameboy that drove a black and white monitor in addition to the LCD, and amplified speakers. Of course, they all had to be tested before shipping, with the only cart they shipped out with - Tetris. Imagine the Tetris theme spewing from 4 Gameboys, out of sync with each other, and at higher than normal volume, for 8 hours a day. It's enough to drive you up the freaking wall.

  • Tetris - a Metaphor for Communism? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 14 2002, @11:06PM (#3883933)
    All the different shaped pieces come together to (hopefully) form perfect, straight, uniform lines. Individualism of each piece fades as it becomes part of the whole.

    However, the longer it goes, the more pieces that come, and the faster they go. Pretty soon, the system begins the breakdown! Things are out of control, and lines stop forming, until you just can't continue any longer.

    Game over.

  • After 17 years of tetris....... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mattygfunk (517948) on Sunday July 14 2002, @11:11PM (#3883958) Homepage
    .....I think everything is starting to fall into place. ;)
  • My mom, as with most people's mothers, does not play video games. However, back around 1992-4 after gameboy had hit it off my brother and I both owned one. I remember one day, a saturday afternoon, and my mom, who was the musical director at a local church, was scheduled to play the organ for a wedding that afternoon. She had just recently picked up on the 'tetris' fever, and come 1 hour before the wedding was to start she was still chugging away on one of our gameboys in our living room, despite my brother and I's efforts to remove her. It finally took a phone call from the bride's parents to drag her away from the evil that is Tetris.

    I love video games, and I give my respect to those games out today which strain even the most expensive video games with their high-end graphics. But any game, even that as simple as Tetris, which can hold the interest and delay my mother from a wedding is something that I will always give tribute too.
  • ... I feel obliged to mention the best form of Tetris, IMHO, Tetrinet/Fast. This is a multiplayer form of tetris with specials (Add lines to opponents, clear lines on yourself, etc) and Tetrifast (Changed exe), removes the line delay between drops. Truely an addictive game to play with friends. You can grab the stuff @ http://www.tetrinet.org

  • Thank you, Alexey, for Tetris... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Artifex (18308) on Sunday July 14 2002, @11:14PM (#3883977) Journal
    Without you, the world would have been stuck with its adiction to Pac-Man sequels and clones, at least until Solitaire got packaged with MS Windows...

    (Speaking of which, can anyone give a good accounting for the history of MS Solitaire? I know xsol and other solitaire games came out way before, but wasn't this the first computer game put in the hands of so many people at once?)
    • Looking at the strings in a sOL.EXE binary from windows 98, microsoft claims copyright on Microsoft Solitaire from 1991-1998- leading me to suggest it was developed for windows 3.1 (windows 3.1 being the earliest version of windows that I touched I can attest to the fact that it was there). This makes xsol 3 years older than windows solitaire by my count (source: Solaris manpage)

      Hope that helped.

  • IP Rights (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MeowMeow Jones (233640) on Sunday July 14 2002, @11:17PM (#3883984)
    Tetris has had one of the most agressive lawsuits to protect IP rights in software history.

    See here [geocities.com] and here [wired.com] among other places

    Although the game is pretty simple, it is innovative, considering the crack-like nature of the game.

    Are the KDE, Gnome, and Emacs versions in good standing with the Tetris Company [tetris.com]?

    • Funny, that Tetris can be so effective in removing similar games, but I Hasbro (which now owns Microprose) hasn't seemed to have complained about FreeCiv [freeciv.org].

      Not that I'm complaining. I've played FreeCiv and I still bought Civ III - I don't think sales are suffering because of it - both games are fun in different ways.

  • You can't win, you know... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by billbaggins (156118) on Sunday July 14 2002, @11:17PM (#3883986)
    Someone at the U of MN Geometry Center created a proof that if the S and Z shapes alternate for long enough (the ceiling he gave was something like 70,000 pieces) you absolutely must lose (depending, of course, on the exact geometry of the well). Even had a Java applet that allowed you to try it yourself...

    Blindingly obvious? Probably. Just the sort of blinding obviousness that makes this country great...

    You can see the applet and a link to the paper here [umn.edu].


  • the gameboy linkup cable probably wouldn't have sold that many units w/o tetris..

    I can't recall any gameboys w/o a tetris cart lying close in ambush. I was still playing tetris on my cell phone to kill time until I got the treo270 :oD (now it's vegas slots..)

    it really goes to show that a good concept will have more longevity and pretty graphics. Now, where's the MULE and a decent Archon update??

  • Ok, Gameboy Tetris (original, I still have my original pak, yah!); max level?

    I have gotten to around 22-23, I think I hit 25 one time. Anybody get up to 30?
    • I've gotten to level 30 and 1.8 million points, but this is in the GameBoy Color version...

      -- Dr. Eldarion --

    • Re:Lets start a bragging war!!! (Score:4, Funny)

      by handsomepete (561396) on Sunday July 14 2002, @11:47PM (#3884077) Journal
      22 was my max in my prime. I was fortunate enough to have played in the preliminary Nintendo World Championships on stage (hey - I was young and video games weren't *as* dorky). Tetris was the last of three back to back games that were played, so I did a lot of "training" beforehand.

      *sigh* If I only had time for that sort of stuff now... I still find time to sneak a gameboy round in, though.

      • Re:Lets start a bragging war!!! (Score:5, Funny)

        by guttentag (313541) on Monday July 15 2002, @01:49AM (#3884385) Journal
        Steve Wozniak [woz.org] is a hard-core Tetris addict:
        I was listed with high Tetris scores many times in Nintendo Power magazine. I also sent letters showing how I'd given GameBoys to Gorbachev and Bush. The latter was seen playing one shortly thereafter on TV in a hospital after a heart problem. It got to the point that Nintendo Power wouldn't list my name again so I sent in a score photo and used the name "Evets Kainzow" which is both my names backwards. When I got the next issue and flipped to see if anyone had beaten my high score, I saw this name but forgot having sent it in. I was worried that someone was close to me. I noticed that he had a foreign sounding name and that he lived in Saratoga, the next city over. Then I realized that it was my own trick.
        His high score is 710,000 (beat that, Mr. Nintendo World Championships!) and he was invited to play "King-Sized Tetris [macrumors.com]" at Brown.
  • I remember when I was 7 years old. I was probably one of the last kids on the block to get a Nintendo. It was Christmas and my parents finally gave in and bought one for me.

    Probably one of my most vivid memories of that time period was not playing the game myself, but my parents addiction to the game. For two people who thought video games were silly, they got very competative, very quickly. All of a sudden my bed time was enforced to the minute and moments after hitting the bed, I could hear the sounds of frustration and rubbing a new high score or number of lines in the spouse's face from my living room downstairs.

    Even a couple winters ago, we went on a trip with some of my younger cousins who had a game boy color. Very quickly heated debates between my mom dad, and myself broke out as to who's turn it was to play that magical piece of purple plastic. I, of course, whooped up on them. Boo yeah!

    The game is great. There are two scores to pay attention to: lines and actual score. There's the A game and the B game. And besides all that it exposed children to great music in the form of blips and bleeps. Too bad my Nintendo died last year. I think the only video games that have brought my family together like that are the old Sierra games like (Space | King's | Police) Quest on our Tandy 1000 and Myst.
  • How many people that have ever picked up any type of game console (and most calculators with power) have never played tetris? The Article is right. There is a version of this game for practically every type of computer that exists today. Anything programmable by hackers (relatively) easily, and there's Tetris.

    And I had the Original Version of Tetris for the PC in Canada. My Dad picked it up in 1988, and my family was hooked. EGA graphics, seeing earth from Mir. That was a game. Level 9 was virtually unachievable. And we played endlessly.

    Then the Game Boy came out. Heaven. Two players! My brother and I played endless matches against each other. On road trips, there was nothing else. Scenery? Whatever. Trying to get a Tetris to send my brother over the top. Winning by completing lines faster wasn't HALF as satisfying as killing the other guy. A non-violent game where you killed your opponent! What could be better?

    And my PARENTS joined in. My Dad was a big computer geek from the get-go, but with Game Boy, even my Mom got in to it. She turned out not-bad for a while too! Occasionally (VERY occasionally) my Dad would even stop driving and let Mom drive, so he could play against us! And in the Family Room at night, playing against each other was often a nightly occurance.

    Then High School. Graphing Calculators. Tetris fever again! Jytris is hands-down the best Tetris clone for the HP48/49. Anybody who's played it would agree. Physics 20/30 was bearable (Easy 90s, but BORING) because of that game alone. And Babal I'll admit, but still, my tetris addiction helped.

    And then Tetris for the N64 (The Next Tetris). Not a bad game at all. Purists would object to being able to "save" a piece (I felt like I was cheating for the longest time), but the look-ahead, and new mono-squares and multi-squares objectives made an enjoyable new twist to my old obsession. And when playing 4-players at parties, I found that me and my friend Simon were always the targets. We completely dominated the competition. It was ALWAYS down to us two. Got so bad that we had to play hot-potato or else we'd get EVERYBODY's garbage. Hmm. Maybe shouldn't have played so much. We were both a little dominant players. Oh well.

    Still, I can't think of any other game I'm still playing from the mid 80s (besides Arkanoid and Rampart the Arcade, but that's another story). I'm always on the lookout for those little pieces made up of four deceptively simple blocks. What other game have you ever actually DREAMED about? What other game do you actually think of scenarios in your head while daydreaming? This happened. Who else will admit it?

    I broke my obsession down to a mere addiction a number of years ago. Who else can just not stop with the blocks? Who has been there since (near) the beginning?

    Erioll
  • was a old EGA version called egaint, which I had on an old 286. Google found me this list of 883 [tripod.com] tetris files.
  • "There is also a very interesting history of tetris online"

    Oh God, my *eyes* - how anyone could read through enough of that bright lavender text on black background to work out that the content is actually "interesting" is beyond me.

    Someone miror it and convert it to something readable, before we blind an entire generation of geeks.
      • But if you highlight a block of text it reverses to a much better green on white

        Nah, too much work. What you need to do is stare at it for a minute, then look at a blank white wall. Presto! Readable text.

  • Interesting quote (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jcsehak (559709) on Sunday July 14 2002, @11:55PM (#3884104) Homepage
    I just was flipping through this old gaming mag today. They had a quote from Alexey, which went something like:
    "I remember the first time I saw those shapes coming down the screen. I had no shape acceleration or point system, and I couldn't program them in because I was having too much fun playing the half-finished game."

    Apparently the shapes looked like this then:

    [][][][]
    []

    and I mean, exactly like that. Simple text brackets. How beautiful is that? One of the best games ever made, nothing but text brackets; still addictive.

    I gotta say though, half of the fun was the music. Where did all the good video game music go anyway? Tetris, Super Mario Bros, Frogger, Zelda. I can't remember the last time a game's theme music was stuck in my head all day.
    • If you can find it, id Software had a guy named Bobby Prince rerecord much of the music from DOOM and DOOM II with real instruments. It's very listenable, especially if you're familiar with the music (from having spent way too much of your youth playing such games!). I tend to cue up the MP3s of those tracks at least once or twice a week while coding at work.

      The album itself is called, I believe, "Doom Music." Probably eBay is your best bet, or something similar; I doubt you're going to find a copy in stores (maybe in a used music store).
      • "Doom Music" is superb - I bought a copy for myself and a friend a few years ago. Easily worth the $15 or so it cost - plus I got a nice personal letter from the Man himself when he shipped my order.
        If you want a nice selection of Bobby Prince tracks, including some from that album you can go here [mp3s.com].
    • Where did all the good video game music go anyway?
      I understand the appeal of a relatively simple tune (like the three Tetris tracks), but I think as the industry has moved toward CD-quality audio, it has found it cheaper/hipper to use existing music than to hire a composer. PlayStation games are notorious for this -- I sometimes wonder if the developers are paying to use the music or if the studios are paying the developers to "push" their music to a captive, impressionable audience.

      Composer Nobuo Uematsu and Final Fantasy's music [ffmusiconline.com] have developed quite a following [gamemusic.com] over the years. The tradition of original soundtracks has survived in the Final Fantasy Dynasty because players have come to expect each new FF to raise the bar for the rest of the industry's music.

      I remember making my own tape of FF2's soundtrack by hooking my SNES up to my tape recorder. FF3 had equally memorable, thematic music. FF7 was a whole new ballgame -- someone in my college dorm reached the game's final battle WAY before the rest of us (he didn't sleep much), and we stood around the TV in awe as we realized the track contained actual singing. It was actually creepy, because we thought it was coming from somewhere else until the voices began chanting the name of the bad guy. In particular, I recommend the orchestral version [gamemusic.com] of the Final Fantasy VIII soundtrack.

      Regardless of the quality of the music, I think one's impression of the associated game influences your appreciation of the music. With that in mind, I'd suggest playing the games before diving into the music.

  • Best version ever: (Score:4, Interesting)

    by x136 (513282) on Monday July 15 2002, @12:11AM (#3884150) Homepage
    Tetris for the Game Boy. I have never found a game that equals the Game Boy version. Every other version has some little quirk, which I end up HATING. :)

    I might as well glue the cart into my circa 1989 Game Boy, as it's the only game I play on it anymore. Well, that, and half of the screen is worn out, and Tetris is the only game that I can see well enough to play. :D

    Happy birthday, Tetris!
  • I'd done the Tetris thing in the 286 heyday, and considered myself too much into it. However, I'm sure there were people with greater levels of addiction. I mean, I only got to the point where I saw blocks descending in my mind's eye as I drifted off to sleep at night. There must have been people whose minds played Tetris like this during daylight hours.

    I upgraded my needs for Tetris-ing to the Blockout game, which I consider to be the 3D version of Tetris. 3D blocks appear on the screen in wireframe; they drop away from you into a pit, and you can spin them +/- on each x, y and z axis. (In practice, I only use one vector of spin, since the spin rate is so fast, and it avoids confusion of which way to spin the cubes.) The blocks opaque as they settle in the pit, and of course the pit tends to fill up towards you.

    I certainly don't play Blockout as much as I did at first, and I never play Tetris anymore. Rarely, I fire up Balltris -- it is like Tetris but uses groups of balls; the groups fall into a pit, and when they make touching patterns (each level of difficulty increments the number of same-colored balls that must be touching), they disappear and the balls cascade and collapse quite intriguingly. I also play Snood, which is like Bubble Trouble; it's kind of like a table pool type of Tetris.

    But the Tetris, Balltris, Blockout and Snood types of games illustrate the remarkable gulf of difference between gamers. I can't stand the Doom and Everquest type of games; my thing is the blipping of colored bits of light into patterns, producing results, but under increasing difficulty until my dexterity and hand-eye coordination fail me. And they are over within 5 minutes, whereas Doom etc. can go on for hours and hours. The textually-graphic game Dungeons of Moria was as much as I could stand.

    I recall playing Tetris and entering something I called the zone -- the place where you were one with the blocks, the rate of fall, and the clicking of the keys to spin, drop and fit each one as it appeared and hurtled downward. It may be that my understanding of sartori and various Zen statements developed from that feeling of the zone. Tetris as Zen training? Stranger things have happened.

  • Why emacs is better than vim: (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wdr1 (31310) <wdr1@po b o x .com> on Monday July 15 2002, @02:43AM (#3884535) Homepage Journal
    emacs -f tetris

    'nuff said. :)

    -Bill

  • The real pre-history of Tetris (Score:4, Interesting)

    by soundman32 (147936) on Monday July 15 2002, @03:35AM (#3884637) Homepage
    Some of the 'official' story seems to be incorrect. I was involved in making the C64 version. The original C64 BASIC version was given to a friend of mine who added music and graphics and optomised it so it was playable on a 1Mhz machine.
    I also question the PC version being the first as I was playing it on the '64 in 1985. For a more detailed history see my tetris page [virgin.net] Neil

  • Xemacs tetris (Score:3, Interesting)

    by affenmann (195152) on Monday July 15 2002, @04:12AM (#3884707)
    Did you ever notice that, when you fire up a new XEmacs tetris, the shapes always come in the same order (The random number generator must be seeded with the same number everytime).
    Damn, I started to memorize half of the play until I realized that.

    So, make sure you always hold down the 'n'-key for a while to make sure you'r not always playing the same game.

  • love is like tetris... (Score:5, Funny)

    by red_crayon (202742) on Monday July 15 2002, @04:28AM (#3884738)
    My freshman year at college, the campus paper did a survey on love/sex/etc.

    This was 1989 and Tetris was quite the late-night procrastination tool before looking for MP3s, etc.

    Included was a series of anonymous quotes about the stare of love on campus. I'll never forget, one female student said:

    Love here is like Tetris. You never get the long piece when you need it.

  • my Alexey story (Score:3, Informative)

    by casemon (448599) on Monday July 15 2002, @07:46AM (#3885206) Homepage
    working at Microsoft (ugh i know) as a Game Designer in the mid 90's, i had the pleasure of working with Alexey.

    at the time, he was a jovial guy, despite the sorted legal histories, with a thick Russian accent and loud, boisterous laugh.

    i was tasked with designing a game that would popularize Windows as a gaming platform (a concern at the time, Win95 was just released) and was thinking about different ways to achieve this. i asked myself about why certain other games were hugely popular, and of course Tetris was on the list. i'd deemed the reason to be that in Tetris, the player does something that they do nearly every second of their waking life; recognizing and sorting information.

    not long after, a new hire was announced in a separate games division. he was really the only other Game Designer at MS at the time, so naturally i sought a rapport; it was Alexey afterall!. we chatted about various things, men of similar ilk (on paper anyway), when one day, i just flat out asked him...

    "Alexey, why do you think Tetris is so popular?"

    he thought about it for a moment, me in silent anticipation realizing the absurdity of the situation; i'm once again talking with the designer of arguably the world's most popular game, when he finaly answered in his Russian-lined English accent...

    "You know Joe, I think it's because it is...something that people do everyday."

    i've been an even bigger fan of Alexey ever since ;)
  • A wonderful Tetris version, the point of which was to be as annoying as possible. Not unlike the character from Star Trek...

    The sounds were annoying when they weren't actually insulting, the lookahead would frequently lie (just infrequently enough that you'd find yourself trusting it at the worst possible time), and then of course the innovations like invisible blocks and pieces on the later levels.

    It all comes together when you hear the "nyah-nyah" sound when it randomly takes a block away from a line you've almost completed...

  • Somewhere... (Score:3, Funny)

    by mstyne (133363) <mike&alphamonkey,org> on Monday July 15 2002, @03:52PM (#3888755) Homepage Journal
    Alexey Pazhitnov created the one game that has caused so many people around the world to just about go nuts trying to win a game that has the ability to slowly drive you to insanity one small misshappen block at a time.

    An english teacher is crying.
    • I must have played too much Tetris, I can't tolerate much anymore. I did find the tetris game on the side of that building at Penn State or wherever pretty interesting. Any got linkage?
    • When I bought Tetris DX for GameBoy Color, the store clerk chuckled and asked me why in the world I was paying $30 for Tetris when I could have any number of action games. I asked him how many of those types of games he played for more than a year, and he couldn't answer me. Tetris just keeps on going.

      • Man, that stuff has been obviously prohibited because it was dangerously addicting, come from some dangerous country or both.

        Tetris is addicting and comes from the source of all evils (URSS), so we better prevent our youth from playing it! Prohibite! Destroy all copies!

        This way, we can be sure that everyone will be playing tetris, and the conquest of the world shall be complete. :)

    • It gets worse than that... I used to see the blocks come together in the words of books I was reading at the time.. I would lose sight of the meaning of the text, and just see the falling blocks.

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