4717679
story
Comments: 177 +- Games: Tetris Turns 25 on Tuesday June 02 2009, @10:30AM
background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicgamespuzzle.gif); width:60px; height:50px;
puzzlegames
background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicentertainment.gif); width:62px; height:44px;
entertainment
background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicgames.gif); width:68px; height:77px;
games
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.'"
Related Stories
It doesn't much signify whom one marries, for one is sure to find out
next morning it was someone else.
-- Will Rogers
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2010 Geeknet, Inc.
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!
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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?
Parent
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.)
Parent
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.
Parent
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 :)
Parent
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.
Parent
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...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow that is scary. Not only can't people tell when your kidding but they can not bother reading more than one line!!!!
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The joke's on them. I am now an expert box and grocery bag packer.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Also, he's working for Microsoft.
Talk about lousy rewards.
Re:Summary (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Summary (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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.
Parent
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...
Parent
Re:Summary (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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)
Parent
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...
Parent
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]
Pajitnov bad man (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 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.
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 ;)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Happy Birthday, Tetris. Lots of good memories playing it on my original Game Boy.
Re:One Quarter of A Century... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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