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.'"
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!
Oh Great (Score:2, Funny)
Thanks, Slashdot.
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.
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:One Quarter of A Century... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Summary (Score:3, Funny)
Also, he's working for Microsoft.
Talk about lousy rewards.
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:3, Funny)
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...
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
Auto Insurance (Score:3, Funny)
I guess (Score:1, Funny)
...This guy [youtube.com] has been playing for 25 years then...
Re:Best of Arcade games (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: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:Oh Great (Score:1, Funny)
HAHA! I've been whistling Theme A for about 10 minutes and didn't realize it until reading your comment. 0_o
Tetris has an amazing effect on the brain.
Re:Summary (Score:4, Funny)
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....
Re:Summary (Score:3, Funny)
The joke's on them. I am now an expert box and grocery bag packer.