Tetris Turns 25 177
teh.f4ll3n writes "25 years ago a Russian (Soviet) researcher thought of one of the world's most popular games. It is now that we celebrate its 25th anniversary. 'Twenty-five years ago, inside the bowels of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, a young artificial intelligence researcher received his first desktop computer — the Soviet-built Elektronika 60, a copy of an American minicomputer called a PDP-11 — and began writing programs for it.'"
Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Summary (Score:5, Funny)
One of the great travesties of gaming, that. The man got little more than a new computer and a modest bonus.
In America, you get games and play them. In Soviet Russia, you make games and get played!
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Re:Summary (Score:5, Informative)
One of the great travesties of gaming, that. The man got little more than a new computer and a modest bonus.
In America, you get games and play them. In Soviet Russia, you make games and get played!
Uh, to be fair, it was really the British and the Hungarians that began the ruination of Pajitnov's rights [wikipedia.org]. From Wikipedia:
The IBM PC version eventually made its way to Budapest, Hungary, where it was ported to various platforms and was "discovered" by a British software house named Andromeda. They attempted to contact Pajitnov to secure the rights for the PC version, but before the deal was firmly settled, they had already sold the rights to Spectrum HoloByte. After failing to settle the deal with Pajitnov, Andromeda attempted to license it from the Hungarian programmers instead.
There's no way you could (at that time) stop the same thing happening to an American. I think this history of litigation and the international scene of respect for software rights had a lot more to do with it than him being Soviet. Also, note that he sold the rights to this game to Spectrum HoloByte in Russia so he got the initial money he was looking for at least for Russian distribution rights it seems. Did he really get played or just fail to realize how great his game was? Sad when someone sells oneself so short but it happens even today, doesn't it?
Re:Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this history of litigation and the international scene of respect for software rights had a lot more to do with it than him being Soviet.
As a Hungarian, I think if we knew he was a Russian, we'd spread it even faster across the globe. (Note this is 1985, before the fall of the Iron Curtain. We didn't like those guys.)
Re:Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, you disapproved of the Soviet regime so you were prepared to punish those innocents suffering under it? You sound like a real jerk.
We were the innocents suffering under it, moron.
Re:Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Though he probably wouldn't have got rich in the US either. The school or company would have asserted ownership rights since the computer he developed it on, was theirs. Which is the downfall of capitalism, in a nutshell :)
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It wouldn't have happened in the US either? Exactly how many counter-examples do you need? Plenty of game developers have created successful games and gone on to start successful companies. Many of those developers would now be classified as "rich" by most standards.
As an employee, you risk less and gain less. The company is paying your wages, and therefore, the company reaps the rewards. In order to strike it big, you must first be willing to risk your *own* capital to finance the chance of such achie
Re:Summary (Another Take) (Score:2)
Funny, I wonder if this works...
don't think striking it rich by writing a simple but hugely entertaining video game was a road to riches for any Free Software developer... was it? Which is the downfall of Open Source, in a nutshell.
I wonder if that same applies?
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The school or company would have asserted ownership rights since the computer he developed it on, was theirs. Which is the downfall of capitalism, in a nutshell :)
Explain how that constitutes the downfall of anything. Why is a programmer entitled to get rich by using someone else's property, on someone else's paid time? If that programmer wants to strike it rich, he can buy a computer and work on it in his basement. Which is exactly what a lot of programmers did do, who did strike it rich.
Re:Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
We were the innocents suffering under it, moron.
All citizens of all countries of the Warsaw Pact were suffering under it. Russians were no exception. In fact, if you go by the numbers of victims, Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians took the worst of it.
It is rather sad to see the Soviet oppression - which applied to everyone, regarding of their nationality or ethnicity - being recast as Russians oppressing other nations nowadays in Eastern Europe, and the associated Russophobia.
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Read less of American newspapers. Who does Russia oppress in Eastern Europe? There are lots of guys claiming stuff like that, because they are imbeciles, morons, and can't change their Russophobic mind 20 years since the collapse of the Communism.
I'm Russian, so I know things first-hand, thank you very much. I don't need to read American newspapers to know how screwed up things were - why, I've read Soviet ones...
As for who the Soviet Union (which I spoke about in my previous post, and not about Russia) oppressed in Eastern Europe - let me just name a few events: Katyn massacre [wikipedia.org]; Hungarian Revolution [wikipedia.org]; Prague Spring [wikipedia.org]. Enough for starters? 'cause the list is long.
Of course, it's twice as long if one considers all the atrocities that were perpetrated on
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I regard your right to have your view, but I entirely disagree with it.
My views are one thing, but facts are facts. Or are you willing to argue that e.g. Katyn massacre wasn't perpetrated by NKVD?
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Reply when you get a clue, AC. Unless you've lived under a true totalitarian regime you've really no place to talk - and I'm afraid Obamanation doesn't count.
It's completely understandable that someone would loathe the citizens of the country that invaded and controlled his own, as a puppet state.
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It's completely understandable that someone would loathe the citizens of the country that invaded and controlled his own, as a puppet state.
No, it's not at all understandable, when citizens of the country that invaded you are really not any better off, and are similarly controlled and oppressed.
If the USSR was a democratic state when it took over Hungary, he'd had a point - after all, it could be said then that Soviet aggression against his country was the will of the people of the USSR. But it wasn't; it was the unelected dictators, both when Hungary was occupied, and when the Hungarian Revolution was brutally suppressed.
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If one does nothing, he is still complicit; the leaders of a nation are accountable to those being governed no matter what the government - if that popular base is entirely eroded, the regime cannot last.
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If one does nothing, he is still complicit
Who's to say that nothing was actually done? If you don't hear about successful uprisings, it's because they weren't successful...
But keep in mind that everyone looking even remotely like a political activist was weeded out during Stalin's purges, and that memory was still very fresh in minds of the people during the whole Hungarian affair.
If one does nothing, he is still complicit; the leaders of a nation are accountable to those being governed no matter what the government - if that popular base is entirely eroded, the regime cannot last.
It is true, but regimes do not fall overnight, either. USSR did fall eventually precisely because of the reasons you describe, but it took time.
In any case, Pajitnov was
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But keep in mind that everyone looking even remotely like a political activist was weeded out during Stalin's purges, and that memory was still very fresh in minds of the people during the whole Hungarian affair.
Not quite. The Russian people had no expectation of democracy, and a deeply ingrained fear and respect for authority [adelaide.edu.au]. Before the communist revolution, they had czarism, the most absolute form of monarchy. Even today, Putin's regime tends to gravitate towards that.
USSR did fall eventually precisely because of the reasons you describe, but it took time.
No. The USSR fell eventually because the planned economy did not take the people into account. Just an example: you have a factory that makes locks, and you measure the output by weight, What do the people do? They make big fucking locks. Consideri
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Your mistake is assuming I'm a westerner. I am, in fact, Russian, even though I was born in 80s, and so only witnessed the sunset of the Soviet empire. Though I don't live in Russia these days, and I generally tend to disassociate from Russia as a state (I didn't vote for Putin or Medvedev or any of their clique, and I strongly dislike the direction they're taking the country, and their methods).
Now, from that perspective...
Not quite. The Russian people had no expectation of democracy
You're very, very wrong. It was only because of the expectation of, and the desire t
Re:Summary (Score:4, Informative)
Uh, to be fair, it was really the British and the Hungarians that began the ruination of Pajitnov's rights [wikipedia.org]
It was far more complex than that. The BBC did an interesting documentary about the history and rights issues of the game a few years back (around the 20th anniversary IIRC). They got fairly frank interviews with people involved at the time (including the man himself, some of the developers and business people who were fighting for the publishing rights, and the Russian civil servant whose job it was to play all the suiters off each other). Well worth a watch.
Search for "tetris from russia with love" - if you can't find it to purchase/rent/stream legitimately I'm sure you'll find a copy on your preferred alternative online TV source...
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And sad story too, how the inventor of the game got almost nothing out of it!
Aye. Though he did end up doing well enough in the end (not as well as he could have done when you consider how much various companies made, but he certainly seems comfortable be all accounts).
Another kind of Twilight Zone (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait a minute... are you implying that intellectual property should be considered property? People should get paid for their ideas? On Slashdot? And you're getting modded Informative? *
* the ideas expressed in this post are not my beliefs, they are presented only for their ironic humor
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Wait a minute... are you implying that intellectual property should be considered property?
Out of curiosity, on what grounds do people say otherwise? Scarcity differences?
Thinking about it offhand, property ownership is just as 'imaginary' as the intellectual variety when it comes down to it. Common to both is that ownership is in the mind, with only a legal construct to back it up. It just so happens that we respect each other's physical property a bit more, probably due to territorial instinct.
[Insert a million comments correcting my ill-thought-out post]
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Wait a minute... are you implying that intellectual property should be considered property?
Actually if they respected the intellectual property, they would have paid the Soviet Union and not the author simply because all copyrightable works were deemed property of the state who got the licensing fees.
Of course to be fair, the Soviet government still paid you know matter what your performance was after that so its pretty much the same as what the RIAA and MPAA want for their works.... Eternal socialist gove
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Why? I doubt that the authors of Adventure, Rouge, and Nethack got even that. Programs should be free.
Actually I do agree with you. He should have been set for life if not filthy rich.
Re:Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Programs should be free.
Yeah, it's not like they take any effort to make and it's certainly not like the creators shouldn't be compensated if they so wish.
NetHack's DevTeam doesn't want money for what they do--awesome. Somebody else does--it's their call.
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Wow that is scary. Not only can't people tell when your kidding but they can not bother reading more than one line!!!!
Compensation on demand? (Score:2)
it's certainly not like the creators shouldn't be compensated if they so wish
You make it sound like you argue that if software writers want to be compensated for their efforts, someone should.
I wrote `filling', http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/java/filling.html [greenend.org.uk]. Where's my money?
I patched Battle for Wesnoth, Nexuiz, Fluxbox, Openbox, slocate, and a buncha' other programs. Where's my money?
I'm not entitled to any money for writing that code. I can ask people to pay me money. I can ask companies to pay me money to write whatever code they want me to write.
If I f
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Tetris is SO unrealisitc
I can't figure out if you were trying to be funny or not, but Tetris (and its "opposite" Jenga) were great practice for many things to be encountered later in life:
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"The man got little more than a new computer and a modest bonus"
witch isn't fair, but...
the people that *make* games in the west, more often than not, are paid similarly by the people that *own* them.
that is: a salary and, in case the game turns up to be a good game, a bonus.
so in this particular case Soviet Russia is equal to most of the west's game industry.
Are you seriously comparing Soviet-era vs. Silicon Valley programmers' salaries?
Re:Summary (Score:5, Funny)
Gaming? Tetris was no game. It was a highly effective Soviet plot to destroy the productivity of Western nations. This was achieved both by direct diversion of billions of man hours of work time, and by brainwashing: replacing the normal thoughts of the workers by images of falling blocks even when they were not using the program.
Re:Summary (Score:5, Funny)
Also, Western workers caught by it had a reduced ability to reproduce, thus making future generations smaller and weaker than their Russian and Chinese counterparts.
Re:Summary (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't this backwards science? The Western workers caught by it are, on average, smaller and weaker than their non-gaming counterparts. If they don't reproduce, then all that's left to reproduce will be the ones who value things like "outside" and "sunlight" more than video games. Their children will share those traits, and the game-players will die off as befits any evolutionary branch with a poor (nonexistent?) reproductive strategy.
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I was referring to "smaller and weaker" as the generation as a whole, not the average of its members. If the average person is stronger, but there are fewer of them, then the other side still has an advantage.
Especially in the case of China, this numbers game obviously completely worked.
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Re:Summary (Score:5, Funny)
Gaming? Tetris was no game. It was a highly effective Soviet plot to destroy the productivity of Western nations.
Gorbachev: Ah, KGB Agent Pajitnov, how goes Projekt Tetris? ... ... ... and also ... well ... ...
Pajitnov: Uh, not so good.
Gorbachev: Nyet? Why not?
Pajitnov: Yeah you see the Tetris, it did preoccupy them but they have all developed very specialized hand-eye coordination
Gorbachev: Meaning?
Pajitnov: Well, they will be better surgeons and
Gorbachev: And?
Pajitnov: Well, our superior MIGs may have problems if they figure out how to hook them up to their F-16 fighter jets
Gorbachev: Yes?
Pajitnov: I've read this new American instruction manual called Ender's Game and our problems may be much larger than we initially thought
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The joke's on them. I am now an expert box and grocery bag packer.
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Also, he's working for Microsoft.
Talk about lousy rewards.
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Re:Summary (Score:5, Interesting)
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No, wait, it's been revised...
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You realize that sometimes Wikijerks prevent people from revising an article to present the truth, right?
Verifiability != truth (Score:2)
You realize that sometimes Wikijerks prevent people from revising an article to present the truth, right?
Wikipedia has never cared about the truth but about verifiability. It defines an encyclopedia article to contain information that is verifiable against reliable secondary sources. And yes, the Wikipedia article mentions The Tetris Company (or should I say The TetriSCOmpany? [abednarz.net]).
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Yes, I know that verifiability is Wikipedia's standard, but there are still power-hungry, freetime-rich jerks who do everything they can to prevent "their" article from being changed from the state they want it to stay.
These individuals, not vandals, are the most frustrating aspect of attempting to contribute to Wikipedia.
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Should Tetris be protected? (Score:2, Interesting)
Should Alexey Pajitnov be granted exclusive rights to release games with Tetris-like gameplay for limited time? Is it in society's best interest? Or do we benefit more by allowing the knockoffs to continue? After all, there's no clear evidence that lack of rules protectio
Re:Summary (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Summary (Score:4, Informative)
Who's richer Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak?
Jobs, but most of his personal fortune comes from NeXT and Pixar, not from Apple. Wozniak did well enough out of Apple not to need to work ever again.
Re:Summary (Score:5, Funny)
But who managed to play Tetris on the 14-story sci-library building at Brown University one cold night?
And who was repeatedly the top scorer at Gameboy Tetris in the Nintendo Power lists? It got to where they wouldn't print my name any more so I sent in the photo of my score spelling my name backwards, Evits Kainzow, and they printed it. This was back around 1988.
So many things to measure and remember life by...
Re:Summary (Score:4, Funny)
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others would make rip-off clones, and he would try to shut them down legally
But Pajitnov never got a U.S. patent, and copyright doesn't apply to game rules [copyright.gov].
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He should have collected a royalty on each copy sold, up to five years ago.
If your browser supports SVG (Score:5, Interesting)
(e.g. Firefox) http://www.croczilla.com/svg/samples/svgtetris/svgtetris.svg [croczilla.com]
And here is steriogram tetris (Score:5, Interesting)
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Just make sure your patched [zerodayinitiative.com] first.
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My browser supports the game but doesn't seem to do key repeat, which means that at later levels you have to bash the keyboard. It's an interesting concept, but AFAIC it's not there yet.
Re:If your browser supports SVG (Score:5, Funny)
(e.g. Firefox) http://www.croczilla.com/svg/samples/svgtetris/svgtetris.svg [croczilla.com]
Posted at 11:52AM
Wow, where did THAT hour go?....
It clearly went into some sort of timewarp where an hour now equals 15 minutes...
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Since we are talking about Tetris, I suspect that 'hour' was 24 hours and 15 minutes
Oh Great (Score:2, Funny)
Thanks, Slashdot.
Grrr blocks (Score:2)
I wrote a Tetris game in Java... (Score:3, Interesting)
...seven years ago; JNLP-enabled launcher and code and whatnot are here [infoether.com].
It was a great exercise, and among other things it taught me that just because I had skimmed through Game Programming Gems [amazon.com] I didn't really know how to code up a game.
BBC Documentary (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd highly recommend getting hold of the BBC documentary "Tetris : From Russia with love". Link [bbc.co.uk]
Also, there was a game design challenge a few years ago at GDC. Mr. Pajitnov was one of the participants (and the eventual winner I think), and I loved the way he approached the problem
Link [gamasutra.com]
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Cool ... thx for highlighting this.
I am not a gamer. On the plus side, that made it much easier for me to ditch Windows some years ago, since I never cared about this or that beloved game that I couldn't play without Windows. On the minus side, it means I generally skip over a lot of Slashdot articles.
But there are two computer/arcade games I love -- Tetris and PacMan. Pong was fun for about two hours, the first time I played it on my friend's dad's Apple something back in the late '70s. I've never grow
L-Block's great victory (Score:2, Interesting)
I still remember L-Block winning the 2008 GameFAQs Character Battle [gamefaqs.com].
Pajitnov bad man (Score:3, Interesting)
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Uh, why should he make his game "more freely available?" Why would you hate him for protecting his property so that he can make a living?
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Once I heard someone say on a discussion about a game that were leaving free beta and going to payed production:
- Noone should pay for entertainment. It should be free for all.
I have never been so amused and sad when I realized he wasn't a troll.
But what is his property? (Score:3, Informative)
Uh, why should he make his game "more freely available?" Why would you hate him for protecting his property so that he can make a living?
But what exactly is his property? Had Pajitnov patented Tetris, it would have expired by now. Copyright is not intended to protect game rules [copyright.gov], and I don't see how trademark would apply to games with names like Lockjaw [pineight.com]. The Tetris Company's claim that other tetromino games are copies of Tetris starts to sound like SCO's claim that Linux is a copy of UNIX.
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Your sig is evidently not true.
Tetrinet, anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
And who can forget the years lost playing Tetrinet [wikipedia.org]?
Nothing like playing with a bunch of friends over a LAN or the Internet... Heck, I still remember some of the crazy cheats that were possible by misusing the text box. (They don't work anymore, and most servers will kick you if you try).
I had some nice Tetrinet themes (a few MIDs of the Tetris music, plus a nice "cheater" skin...).
Tetristory (Score:5, Interesting)
Two uses Tetris has been put to over the years:
Training through Neurofeedback (EEG biofeedback) kids with ADD to be able to maintain attention despite distractions.
Preliminary testing of helicopter pilot trainees in the Hungarian air force; testing ability to maintain attention with increased activity. EEG was used to validate the early results, but the after that the game score itself was adequate.
As for Pajitnov not getting his due, it was after all, Soviet Russia. Nobody got, or could even expect, getting something due them across the Iron curtain. This was only a game. There was an complete cyrillic based Apple //e system produced over there for years. The major stimulus for that? AppleWorks 1.3 was being used as the primary inventory data handling app by the Red Army from the unit level up. Version 1.4 was hacked to work on their cyrillic machine. Apple never saw dime one from any of that.
Auto Insurance (Score:3, Funny)
Tetris predcessor: pentamino (Score:4, Interesting)
Not sure if this game was any popular in US or Europe, but it was quite popular in USSR circa 80s (for small kids of course). I had the game and very much enjoyed it.
I still have it at my mother's.
Here's the link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentomino [wikipedia.org]
So it's not very hard to guess where the guy got idea from. Of course this takes a lot of luck and genius to turn into addictive game ;)
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Interesting, I remember playing that when I was younger on my game boy [wikipedia.org].
Kind of makes sense.. take a board game that is based on pure, off-line (that is, non-timed) thought, make it a bit easier but add a time limit and an element of chance, and you have the recipe for an addictive game.
Tetris Documentary (Score:2)
Possibly one of the best games ever (Score:2)
Hum (Score:4, Funny)
I was going to say something witty, but the characters of the two-liner matched up so perfectly that they disappeared in a puff of points.
Bastard Tetris (Score:2, Funny)
http://fph.altervista.org/prog/bastet.html [altervista.org]
There was a /. article about it a few years back. It always tries to choose the worst possible block for the next block coming up. Need that long 4 square block? You'll get a evilly oriented z-block....
Overrated (Score:2)
Re:Best of Arcade games (Score:5, Funny)
I know, right? I mean, in high school I got a summer job loading hay bales into trucks just to work on my Tetris skills.
It had the unfortunate side effect of sculpting my upper body into the form of Adonis, and all the attention from women prevented me from playing Tetris as much as I wanted -- but man, my fitting-blocks-into-a-confined-space skills really blossomed that summer.
If you graduated from playing Tetris to moving blocks in real life, you may have had a problem.
Or maybe it's me with the problem, as I simply cannot comprehend the depths of your nerdhood. I bow before you, nerdly master.
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It had the unfortunate side effect of sculpting my upper body into the form of Adonis, and all the attention from women prevented me from playing Tetris as much as I wanted -- but man, my fitting-blocks-into-a-confined-space skills really blossomed that summer.
Wow, I wouldn't have guessed this guy [youtube.com] was on Slashdot!
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Why not? I graduated to stuffing random shaped boxes in the company van for a run across state. Full to the brim and barely a hole left to toss in a lunch box :)
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Who has not tried to arrange blocks even in real life after getting hooked onto tetris.
Ask Homer Simpson. [youtube.com]
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Either you didn't watch the video or you're the one who made it. In both cases, shame on you.
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Shit.
Tetris is the best game of all time.
Yes, that includes sports, board games, and sexual games.
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Happy Birthday, Tetris. Lots of good memories playing it on my original Game Boy.
Re:One Quarter of A Century... (Score:5, Funny)
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Yes but at least at those parties you're guaranteed a foursome in every possible position.
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For multiplayer where you send garbage to your opponent, what you want is Tetris for the Nintendo DS. As essential on the DS as it was on the earlier Game Boys, this is a tremendous value in that you can do a 10-player local (line of site) game when only one of you has the cartridge. You can also play against three people online.
Ooh, and they released Tetris via WiiWare and its multiplayer lets you send garbage as well.
I always loved Tetris Attack for the SNES (and Gameboy Color), and was disappointed tha
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Statistically speaking, one should have an overage of I pieces if everything is randomly distributed.
To make a 4-line clear, you need 40 squares. Each piece takes 4 squares, so you'd need 1 in 10 pieces to be I pieces. As that's just shy of the 1 in 7 you'd get from random distribution.
Anyone having persistent shortages of I pieces is either astronomically unlucky or is playing an unrandom game.