Tetris

The first DOS Tetris

2008-12-18T10:01:00.000-08:00

The first MS DOS version of Tetris was implemented a few days after Alexey put together his first prototype of the game for the Electronica 60. All three of us - Dmitry, Alexey, and I - were fans of Pascal and structured programming despite then-recently-published text "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal". We used various flavors of Pascal to implement our game ideas. Under MS DOS the development system of choice was Borland's Turbo Pascal. I started learning programming with v1.0. In fact, I still enjoy programming in the descendant of Turbo Pascal - Borland Delphi. The last version of Tetris, we worked on together, was compiled with Turbo Pascal 4. That last version of the game had number 3.12. Although 3.12 is pretty much an arbitrary number as we did not have a strict versioning policy. By the way, this version has an Easter Egg. Although not a sophisticated one. I wonder if anyone can discover it.

The MS DOS version is quite different from the Electronica 60 draft which initially had just the glass and a score count. That version worked on a monochromatic (green/black) alphanumeric display. The tetramino squares were drawn as a pair of square brackets [ ]. Remarkably, the game was playable and addictive even in that form. This gave us a reason to hurry up with the MS DOS implementation. I believe Alexey expanded his Electronica version of the game after we ported it to the PC to match some of the features we had in our PC games. I never worked with Electronica computers myself.

We diligently implemented the MS DOS version of the game in such a way that it could run on any PC we had available. The program ran in a text mode using colored space symbols to represent squares of teraminos. The game could even automatically recognize the IBM monochrome card adjusting the way it drew (printed) on the screen. The clock-frequency race had already started with the introduction of IBM PC AT and PC clones. Many games released for the earlier PC and PC XT (4.77 MHz) models ran too fast on the newer machines. The last version of our game was one of the first to use proper timer delays. 20 years later the same program still runs without any changes, looks and feels the same (especially in the full screen DOS box).

System: Windows, DOS

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Roogoo

2008-12-09T07:33:00.000-08:00

Roogoo's visuals are cute and the concept is simple, but this fast-paced game of quick reflexes is surprisingly fun and challenging.

Ah, falling shapes. They're at the center of some of the best and most addictive games of all time. Roogoo offers up a fresh take on the concept that's extremely simple, but don't let that keep you away. While games don't get much more basic than Roogoo, it still provides a compulsively enjoyable and surprisingly challenging gameplay experience.

Roogoo kicks things off with a series of cutscenes that establish the game's story. Apparently the peace-loving, generically cute Roogoo of the planet Roo have always relied on falling meteors that radiate joy to sustain them. One day, King Moo started channeling the power of the meteors into building cities on the lush green planet, but this selfish act turned him and his followers into evil, only slightly less cute Meemoo. Now, as one of the remaining Roogoo, you've got to help the falling meteors reach the planet's core and keep them out of the hands of the king's son, Prince Moo. Or something. Really, it's best not to worry too much about the story. All you really need to know is that this is a game about falling shapes that you have to guide safely through a series of platforms.

Although Roogoo may look like a puzzle game at first glance, in fact, it's essentially a very simple game of precision and quick reflexes. You don't have any control over the falling shapes themselves, and you don't use the thumbsticks or the D pad at all. Roogoo is played primarily using the shoulder buttons on the controller. As shapes fall, they must pass through a series of platforms, which conveniently have holes in them that match the various shapes. Your task is to use the shoulder buttons to rotate the platform as the shapes are approaching, so that the falling shapes are lined up with the corresponding holes. If you fail to rotate the platform into the correct position before the shapes hit the platform, they'll get knocked away. If you lose enough shapes, it's game over. That's really all there is to it. It may sound easy, and although it certainly starts out that way, Roogoo actually gets quite challenging as you progress through its 45 single-player levels. Things ultimately get downright ludicrous, requiring robotlike speed and accuracy on the game's default difficulty setting. Thankfully, the casual setting makes things considerably easier, but it's perhaps a bit too easy. A setting that fell somewhere in between the game's two options might have been ideal.

While your fundamental objective remains the same throughout, Roogoo does a decent job of keeping things interesting by frequently introducing new elements that make your job a bit more complicated. Initially, there are only three shapes to deal with, but the game soon bumps that up to four and eventually five. Stacks of shapes also start out falling one at a time, but eventually, they fall in rapid bursts containing many different shapes, forcing you to rapidly rotate the platform back and forth to keep them all. You'll also have to cope with shutters that open and close over the holes, as well as platforms that periodically flip end over end, requiring you to time when your shapes pass through the platform by pressing A to speed up their descent. Additionally, nefarious Meemoo will stand on the platforms. You'll need to bump them off with fast-falling shapes, sometimes in a specific order. Some platforms automatically speed up all shapes that pass through them. Occasionally stacks of falling shapes will have two shades to them, and you'll need to press B to alternate the shades so that like colors are touching when the falling stack lands on a stack you've already set down. All of these elements can make for a great deal to keep track of, and when the action is moving quickly, the game can get positively nerve-wracking. Completing a tough level is really satisfying, and the kind of frustration that results from failing is typically the best sort of frustration a game can cause: the kind that motivates you to try again because you know that, while difficult, the game wasn't unfair. You simply screwed up one too many times.

At least, that's usually the case. There are times where the game doesn't provide you with the best view of the action, making things unfairly difficult. Sometimes the camera is simply positioned too far away from a platform, making it hard to tell if you have the falling shapes lined up with the corresponding hole or not. At other times, your view of the holes on a given platform is obscured by stacks of shapes you've already set down. Still, for the most part, the visual presentation in Roogoo, while very simple, is bright and clear. Each shape also has its own vivid color, which can help you identify them when things are moving quickly. You probably won't spend much time looking at the various backgrounds, but they have a clean, cheery style to them that fits the game well. The music in the game mostly consists of light, upbeat electronic tracks that make for a good accompaniment to the action. The relatively few sound effects there are, such as the mewling of Roogoo and Meemoo, also go hand-in-hand with the game's cute, colorful visuals.

The single-player game has 45 levels, which offer plenty of challenge on the default difficulty, but those players who opt for the easier setting will probably breeze through them quickly. Going for each level's par time, which is typically very difficult to achieve, will provide added longevity for those who really want to master Roogoo. There are also a few multiplayer options available.

Online multiplayer offers a one-on-one competition that plays out exactly like the single-player game, except that each player also has a power meter, which fills up as shapes are guided safely through the platforms. When the meter is full, pressing Y sends some evil Meemoo to stand on your opponent's platform. The game works really well for this kind of competitive face-off, but unfortunately, very few people are playing Roogoo online, so unless you've got a friend on Xbox Live to play with you, finding an opponent may be difficult. Roogoo also has local multiplayer, which, in addition to the competitive mode, offers a pretty fun cooperative party mode in which control of the platforms alternates quickly among up to four players.

Roogoo demonstrates that a very simple game doesn't have to be a shallow game. In fact, Roogoo's simplicity is something of an asset, making the gameplay accessible to just about anyone but requiring tremendous skill to master. While 800 points is perhaps a tad steep for such a fundamentally simple game, Roogoo's fast-paced, challenging twist on the old falling-shapes concept is absolutely worth a look.

By Carolyn Petit, GameSpot

Tetris 5000

2008-12-09T07:26:00.000-08:00

The EleFun Multimedia Company has released Tetris 5000 - a remake of the most famous game in the world Tetris. The game has many advantages and is really worth playing. It has perfect and fascinating gameplay of a classical Tetris, as well as many other unique features.

Millions of Tetris fans will experience well known feelings, which will be added to the delight from new features and know-how of Tetris 5000. Tetris 5000 broadens gameplay of a classical Tetris. Frames of a game field of this game became interactive and now they are moving from side to side. Bonuses of Tetris 5000 make the game original. For example, bonus “rubber bomb”. It appears suddenly, and its damage radius is great. Sometimes a huge irregular-shaped figure appears in the game. Try to put it in such a way not to lose the round! Visualization in Tetris 5000 is worth to be highly estimated.

The game is full of different colours and hues. They possess positive energy and do not make disharmony. Destruction of the whole rows in Tetris 5000 is animated in detail. Two caudate comets are fluttering along the edges of the game field.

The moment you put together the whole row or several rows, the comets rush into the game field and whole rows disappear in blazing enchanting flashes. The main peculiarities of Tetris 5000 are animated themes, which play a role of a game background.

These themes are made on the basis of animated screensavers of the EleFun Multimedia Company. You will be able to choose the background of Tetris 5000 and have new and unforgettable impressions at each run of the game.

System: Windows

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Snake Tetris

2008-12-09T07:12:00.000-08:00

Snake game and Tetris game combine to form this brand new game! Come and challenge yourself with this new tetris game! Also included are snake game and tetris game, so you get 3 games from 1 download!

Snake Tetris is a creative tetris game in which the falling blocks are not rigid bodies, but movable snakes. You can control the snakes to go through small holes to fill up the gaps. When an entire row is filled, that row will be destroyed. Sounds easy? No way, obstacles will be formed to block your way, so you must move the snakes dexterously in order to win!
As with snakes game you can guide the snakes to eat special items for extra points or increased power. Come and download the game to find out yourself.

Snake game is a remake of the classic with a twist. Every time you control the snake to eat an item, an obstacle will be formed on the field. There are special items called the power food, when the snake eats this, it becomes invincible and can eat the walls for a short time. This added game element makes the snake game very fun and challenging.
Tetris game is a remake of the classic with another twist. This time you can guide the blocks to eat items just as you can with a snake, after an item is eaten, an obstacle will be formed to block your way. But when you eat a power food, the block becomes explosive and can destroy all the neighbouring blocks when it lands. This new element makes the game very challenging and rewarding, especially when you have to clear 5 rows in order to rescue yourself by eating the power food.

All 3 games include a 2 players mode, so you can compete with your friends to see who is the master of snake tetris.
This demo version will never expire, but you can only play for a short time in each game. So when the time is up, you have to play the game from the beginning again.

System: Windows

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RotoBlox

2008-12-09T07:04:00.000-08:00

RotoBlox is a mixed collection of classic and newest tetris games. Play your favorit games, and try new game types of this highly addictive arcade. The game has different skins. Sink in a jungle world, distant galaxy or construction plant. Download RotoBlox and play any of these magnificent tetris games. The game is a nice gift for a real tetris maniacs! As in the classic tetris, the goal is to use different falling shapes to create complete horizontal lines without gaps. Becoming complete, lines are removed from the gamefield and bring you the score. The more lines you clear, the higher your score is.

Game Features
- 9+ fun different tetris games
- Useful and dangerous bonuses
- High-quality art design
- Skins support
- Professional sound effects and music

System: Windows

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QuesTrix

2008-12-09T06:51:00.000-08:00

QuesTrix combines classical falling blocks gameplay with role-playing elements such as Bonuses, Skills and Artifacts. Collecting experience points during the game, you can choose among available items to help you in your journey. Look for your own strategy to get top scores!

Features
- Beautiful high resolution 32-bit graphics
- Funny sounds and quality background music
- Support for multiple player profiles
- In-game help system with descriptions of all role-playing items
- Playing either with keyboard or mouse as you prefer
- Non-violent and fun for all ages

Additional Full Version Benefits
- Unlimited number of levels
- Automatic save-game ability, even if you quit the game instantly
- All 8 levels of bombing skill, 8 levels of drilling skill and 9 levels of filling skill
- All role-playing artifacts and bonuses available without limits
- Hiscore table
- Collection of enlightening quotations shown to you during the game
- Free tech support
- Free updates and bonuses
- 30-day unconditional money back guarantee

System: Windows

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PipeFun 2

2008-12-09T06:47:00.000-08:00

Some things are just good together. Like beer and pizza. Popcorn and movies. Or ice cream and raspberry pie. While these are quite good by themselves, together they are a blast. So, if you are a game gourmet, you are always looking for new and innovative mixes and crossbreeds. So here it is - a new addictive game called PipeFun 2. This is a brain-bending concoction of Tetris and PipeDream. Your objective is to rotate pieces of pipes that fall down to form longer pipes. There are two game modes. The first one, PipeLine, requires you to make a completely closed pipe system in order for it to disappear. The second mode, Arcade, is a bit easier, since all you have to do is to combine 4 pieces of pipes in any manner you prefer for them to disappear. In addition, if you clear a five piece long pipe section, you will be given a bomb you can use to blow up unnecessary pipe pieces still left on the game board. There is a small demo that shows how the game works. The game can be controlled either by arrow keys or joystick/gamepad. To make the game a bit more challenging, you may opt to turn the countdown timer on.

PipeFun 2 features 20 different levels. To match the game to your skills and to make you feel comfortable, you can choose between three different game difficulty levels. But watch out - PipeFun comes with bright and vivid graphics, subtle soundtrack and addictive gameplay that will keep you occupied for hours at a time.

System: Windows

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Fatman Blocks 2

2008-12-09T06:41:00.000-08:00

Try a super playable and engaging game Fatman Blocks 2! We have put the best game ingredients ever found and got the most enjoyable mixture: captivating idea, bright design and unusual combination of block building scheme. All these give you the unique opportunity to develop your own bricks-breaking strategy and exercise your mind while enjoying dynamic and funny game! Fatman blocks 2 will surprise you with visible simplicity and inner sophistication. The aim of the game is to destroy blocks of colored bricks falling from the top. This time colorful blocks and bricks give even more fun - you can move them, change their position and plan your Triumph! Find three different play modes with separate on-line TOP lists, flexible system of bonuses and speeding up on the higher levels.

Enjoy addictive gameplay, original exciting sound-track and rich animation-style graphics. Non-stop fun with fitting tricky blocks. User-friendly interface, handy menu, easy settings and pleasing design add charm to this amusing family-oriented game! Playing Fatman blocks 2 you can compete with other gamers and hold our Top record getting the highest score. Save your highest score in worldwide Score table and participate in unbelievable online competition. Be our Champion! Try once and you can't stop playing

Real excitement for all gamers!

System: Windows

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Fantasy Tetrix

2008-12-09T06:34:00.000-08:00

Fantasy Tetrix is an ultra-modern 3D remake of the all-time classic Tetris game. This game will keep you playing for days on end because it comes with mind-boggling special effects, 12 ear-pleasing background tracks in stereo and addictive gameplay. Moreover, there are four different game variations to choose from: Fantasy, Advanced, Professional and Extreme which were specially developed for players of various abilities and preferences. The advanced interface settings put you in control over the various features of the game such as the quality of the blocks, the speed of the rotation, the sensitivity of the keyboard, multimedia options and many others.

System: Windows

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Drippy

2008-12-09T06:21:00.000-08:00

A completely new game! No, really! Not just an old game with a different name and better graphics and enough little changes to evade copyright, but a whole new game concept. It's not Tetris. It's not Columns. It's not Puzzle Bobble. It's... Drippy!

It's a simple enough concept. Catch coloured drips in your beaker and sort them into big gooey blobs. Drop stars into each blob - two stars and the blob explodes. The bigger the blob, the more points you get for blowing it up. Simple. Addictive. You'll soon be using Drippy-player catch-phrases like "Orange! What do you mean, orange?" and "No! Not THERE!!" Appears to suck time into some kind of black hole. Two big thumbs half-up from the Carpal Tunnel Association. Remember, if you're not getting RSI, you're doing it wrong.

System: Windows

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Downfall

2008-12-09T06:16:00.000-08:00

3D arcade puzzle game (logic/rules similar to Tetris and Columns).

It features real-time 3D graphics and lots of different boards to play.
All boards have special blocks like indestructibles, dynamite sticks, snow shovels, wrecking balls and more.

Another cool feature is the import-export highscores, which lets you swap highscores with your friends. When importing, Downfall merges the highscores together, keeping the best ones. The game is easy to learn. You just drop stacks with colored blocks to form lines that will react and disappear, to score points. Keep in mind that each board requires its own tactics and skills to master!

Here are some key features of "Downfall":

· Real-time 3D graphics.
· Over 30 different boards with unique designs.
· Easy to learn, whether you have played other "falling blocks" type games (like Tetris from The Tetris Company or Columns from Sega) or not.
· Hard to master, since every board requires different tactics and skills.
· Import/export highscores.
· OpenGL support.

System: Windows, Mac

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Crazy Tetris

2008-12-09T06:07:00.000-08:00

Crazy Tetris is an unusual clone of the immortal Tetris game. In this Tetris game blocks consist not only of squares, but of triangles too.

Crazy Tetris includes 6 absolutely different variations of the famous game with falling blocks with twist:
- Simple
- Classic Tetris
- Pentix
- Triangularis
- Mutatix
- Crazy

Types of the game are listed from the simplest to the hardest. Even small kids can play in the Simple Tetris mode, but playing Mutatix and Crazy is for extreme Tetris players in general.

You will find friendly interface, nice sounds, music, large High scores table and World Records Table in this Tetris game. Also before writing your name to High Scores you can choose a pleased face from the list of more than 200 funny faces.

The goal of the Tetris game is to maximize your score by placing the falling blocks or triangles into lines. Every assembled line that has disappeared increases your score.

If you are a Tetris fan, you should download Crazy Tetris! Download Tetris and enjoy! Tetris is a really good game for having some rest after work!

System: Windows

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CosmoBlocks

2008-12-09T06:01:00.000-08:00

We all love games. That is the fact. Play activity is one of the major parts of human life. Computer is the infinite source of fun and entertainment as it allows making our imagination work for us at its best.

Today, fast processors allow creation of extremely realistic game universes while modern graphic cards offer astonishing visualization. All in all, this means modern computer games are fun, action packed and entertaining.

However, there are certain drawbacks: latest games become more and more complicated and often require that you learn playing before actually getting the joy you are after. Many of us miss those old days when graphics were primitive but the overall playability of classic puzzles was awesome.

Well, here is something for you! Introducing CosmoBlocks, the unique brick game by Energames.com that combines classic tetris playability with latest technologies to offer the most action-packed and graphically advanced block game remake ever!

CosmoBlocks offers all brick game fans to immerse into the whole new universe of galactic travel with 5 mind-bending brick games in one package. Whether you prefer standard, Crazy, Pentix or Emptyx game styles CosmoBlocks has it all! It even has the Kid mode, which is very simple to master for children while keeping the game most enjoyable.

The game features advanced graphical engine that ensures you actually play bricks aboard of space ship blasting through the myriads of stars and not just dropping pieces into a cup. Talking the game cup it is absolutely interactive — it behaves as it actually would in zero-gravity conditions of a space cruiser.

Another important part of CosmoBlocks universe is gorgeous music and amazing sound effects that put you in the atmosphere of space travels. The game is highly configurable when it comes to user interface and hardware modes.

Enjoy the toughest brick game challenges as you race through space on a fusion powered hyper space ship! Download free trial version right now!

System: Windows, Linux

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Bloxter

2008-12-09T05:54:00.000-08:00

Bloxter is a fun arcade/puzzle game, that uses the latest technology to produce stunning 3D graphics. The logic and rules are similar to other "falling blocks" games like Tetris® and Columns™. Even if you've never played any of those games, Bloxter is very easy to learn. Drop colored blocks and try to form lines that will react and disappear!

Your job as a bloxter is to produce energy in a block reactor, using colored blocks and various tools. You may encounter alien life-forms called vaders (Arcade Mode only). Some of these vaders are evil, while others will help you. Bloxter consists of over 30 different boards to play, with smooth 3D animations and endless replayability. It has two different game modes: 'Puzzle Mode' with classic gameplay and no distractions, and 'Arcade Mode' with bonus lamps and alien monsters. It also features an import-export high scores function, which lets you swap high scores with your friends. When importing, Bloxter merges the high scores together, keeping the best ones.

System: Windows, Mac

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Bastet

2008-12-09T05:44:00.000-08:00

Have you ever thought Tetris(R) was evil because it wouldn't send you that straight "I" brick you needed in order to clear four rows at the same time? Well Tetris(R) probably isn't evil, but Bastet certainly is. >:-)
Bastet stands for "bastard tetris", and is a simple ncurses-based Tetris(R) clone for Linux. Unlike normal Tetris(R), however, Bastet does not choose your next brick at random. Instead, Bastet uses a special algorithm designed to choose the worst brick possible. As you can imagine, playing Bastet can be a very frustrating experience!

Features:
-Increasing block speed
-Selectable difficulty level
-High score list
-Good looking and colorful. :)
-One key brick "drop-till-the-end"
-Pausing
-The brick preview is now a "teaser" box. Instead of displaying the next brick, it displays the "most useful" brick (according to Bastet's engine). Needless to say, you will *never* get that brick!

Keys Controls (can be remapped by editing config.h):
-left/right: moves current brick left/right
-up/keypad 0 (if you have Numlock on): rotates current brick
-space: drops current brick
-p: pause (press any key to continue)
-q: ends current match (and eventually sends you to the highscore list)
-ctrl-c: abruptly terminates the program (hopefully without messing up your terminal)

System: Windows, Linux

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Best Places to Play Tetris

2008-12-09T05:37:00.000-08:00

For those of us with day jobs, the only Tetris we know is the one on our PC or laptop- or, if we have a SWEET day job, the one on our iPod or PDA. But for the hobby Tetris player, committing yourself to only one type of Tetris is a sacrifice you shouldn’t have to make. Granted, the real Tetris has the same common traits. There are 7 differently colored pieces, loosely shaped like and named correspondingly to the letters: I, J, S, L, O, T, Z. Players get points for wiping out a horizontal line. The level increase is reflected in the speed of the falling blocks. And the game ends once you can no longer react quick enough to arrange the Tetris so that you can wipe out the lines and prevent its piling to the top.

We all have preferences. I, for instance, am a sucker for the laid back, the simple and the unaffected. I perform best reclined on a sofa with my legs crossed. The one for me is the Gameboy original Tetris. Many fans seem to agree. Probably because there is no better love than the first. This handheld makes the opposable thumbs the star-players. The Gameboy version is said to be the most challenging because the glass has two rows less and it’s faster. This version also has ‘naïve gravity’. The distance the blocks slide is in exact proportion to the number of lines annihilated . If there are any gaps under the blocks, they will remain hanging above the gap. Newer versions of Tetris have a chain effect reaction. The blocks above a cleared line will fall until it meets the base or the next block below it. This might appease novel Tetris players, but would leave the more experienced Tetris players slighted.

For those who aren’t colorblind, you may want to trade the unicolor Tetris with the 1998 Tetris DX, released on Game Boy Color. Different colors are not only cosmetic. It helps players quickly differentiate the pieces at a glance, allowing faster response and execution. On the downside, for people who really have a lot of spare time, the maximum 999,999 points of the Nintendo Tetris is disappointingly restrictive.

On the PC, competition between Tetris and other Tetris-spawns are ambiguous and less conclusive. Generally, the PC forces players to sit upright and utilize two more fingers on the keyboard.

Strong abiders by OpenSource and Linux, a.k.a ‘the people who want to do things the hard way’, have a Tetris manifestation of their own. Fitting to it’s program designed to analyze your current tetramino pile-up then send the worst piece- it is called Bastard Tetris or ‘Bastet’. If before, you felt like biting your arm off each time the random piece seemed to be a premeditated attempt at ending your game, this time you know it was no accident. And we all could use that much more certainty in ourlives, no?

If you answered No, then good. You’re sane and you want prevent serious destruction of your PC. Gnome 3D Tetris is the best thing for you. This 3D game gives you a top-down perspective and gives you control over the field size, speed level and difficulty of the pieces. It has had rave reviews from plenty of Linux users and unlike the Bastet, it has sound! Yeay! Something to drown out the cursing.

For users who operate on their Macs, Quinn is the apple of their eye. The game boasts of all the traditional features of Tetris while making it look spiffy the Apple way. The color of pieces can be customized and there is a two-player option which splits the screen into two and is manueverable using both sides of the keyboard. So with Quinn, you can share that delicious Tetris frustration.

And surprise, surprise. Tetris now comes to us in the flesh. That is if pieces of tetraminoes had flesh. The boardgame incarnation of Tetris is called Rumis, and it’s played with 2 to 4 players. All players try to position a piece adjacent to their already placed pieces. Players have their own pieces of different shapes, which they use to build Incan pyramid-like structures. At the end, the final score for players is calculated by counting the number of squares in their color, as seen from above, and subtracting the number of polycubes left in their supply. The player with the most points is the winner. Probably not as true to the real Tetris, but if you want a break from the virtual world and want to play with tetraminoes that you can flip and fiddle- Rumis is a worthy platform.

Now. While we could also start talking about the best Tetris versions on PS2 and Xbox- I’d rather not. Most reviews of Tetris on game consoles are negative. Once you’re on PS2 or Xbox, it gets pretty pointless to play Tetris, which doesn’t require a joystick because it doesn’t need you to shoot zombies. So basically, the best places to play Tetris are the ones that are minimal enough while retaining smoothness, attractiveness, and leaves the rest up to the players and their brains. The spirit of Tetris is that it’s a simple game that is tough. So you decide where to play based on how you play Tetris best. But I say:(I hope Nintendo reads this) stick to Game Boy.

Absolute Tetris

2008-12-09T05:25:00.000-08:00

Absolute Tetris is a perfect blend of scientific approach and restyling of the classic Tetris concept. The gameplay model imitates a floating frame immersed in flow medium, with various sci-fi elements added. As the result, the classical gameplay has been changed greatly. Game rules are almost the same. Four-brick figures fall in random order. The player's goal is to blow up the figures by arranging them into even layers. Each piled layer gives the player a certain umber of points. In addition, the gameplay is split into minor levels. All the levels vary in falling speed, bonuses, and specificity of playing. The ultimate goal is to get the maximum number of points.Absolute Tetris - is a 2D game embodied on a 3D engine. It means that gameplay logic lies in a 2D plane but the game world itself is 3-dimensional. It refers to all the game components: characters, bonuses and game objects. The entire gameplay happens inside a dynamic interactive frame. The main gameplay characters are Krooglish and Pryamish. These two nice guys accompany the player along the entire game process. The game bonuses are of two types: vertical and external. The game is designed for gamers with various tastes.

System: Windows,

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2001 TetRize

2008-12-09T05:08:00.000-08:00

2001 TetRize is an ultra-modern 3-dimensional Tetris-like game. The complete version of 2001 TetRize includes three types: TetRize, Color TetRize and Colorix TetRize. TetRize is the game similar to classic Tetris. Color TetRize is the color Tetris. A three-tile column falls from the top of the screen. The purpose is to form columns, rows or diagonals of at least three tiles of the same color. Colorix TetRize game is an special variation of Color TetRize. A three-tile row falls from the top of the screen. The purpose is the same.
For each of three game types are available two variations: Classic & Original. Original variation includes new bonuses & it is faster than classic variation. The rules of 2001 TetRize are simple --- but it will give unforgettable pleasure to people of every age!

TetRize - Classic Variation
2001 TetRize is an exciting action game. As you play, the four-part TetRize pieces fall from the top of the playing area. As they fall, you can rotate them, move them horizontally, and make them drop faster. When the pieces form a solid row of blocks across the playing area, that row vanishes. You can manipulate a piece only when it is falling. Try to make as many rows disappear as you can, and continue playing for as long as possible. The game ends when the stacked pieces reach the top of the playing area.

Color TetRize - Classic Variation
This is a popular game similar to all Tetris clones, this time with colors to gather instead of lines. A three-tile column falls from the top of the screen. You can use the keyboard arrows to move the column, and the up arrow to swap the three tiles between themselves. The purpose is to form columns, rows or diagonals of at least three tiles of the same color. The more tiles are in a "column", the more points you earn. When you form a column, its tiles disappear and the other tiles can fall.

Colorix TetRize - Classic Variation
This game is similar to Color TetRize, but a three-tile row falls from the top of the screen.

TetRize/Color TetRize/Colorix TetRize - Original Variation
Rules are the same as in Classic, but game includes new bonuses. Sometimes throughout the game bonuses appeares in the playing area. You should try to touch them by falling pieces. There are two additional bonuses: "score" and "clear all". "Score" gives you 500 points, "clear all" destroys all blocks in the playing area. Also, this variation is more faster than Classic.

Game Features:

- Three complete game types in two variations for each type
- Real 3D graphics
- User-defined Window size
- Cool music score
- User-friendly interface
- Install / uninstall Support
- Joystick support
- Lifetime technical support

System Requirements
- 3D Graphics card
- DirectX 7.0 or higher
- Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP
- Processor 233 MHz or higher
- 32 MB RAM
- 10 MB free disk space
- Sound card - optional

System: Windows,

| DOWNLOAD |

Screens:

TGM HOLiC aka Jin8 playing TGM3. The best tetris player.

2008-12-03T15:12:00.000-08:00

Tetris is by far the most popular and probably most addictive puzzle game there is. One dude, obviously from Japan, named TGM Holic / jin8 knows this game inside out. This is apparently his choice in life: to kick everybody's ass playing Tetris. The video clip below shows his total dedication.
Watch as he kills, and then at 03:03 he kills even more - just to finish off with playing the game in invisible mode!

Human Tetris - The Grand Master

2008-12-03T14:49:00.000-08:00

Human Tetris - Crazy and comedic Japanese tetris TV game show which turns human into tetris pieces. The goal is to squeeze through cut out silhouettes in a moving wall. If contestants cannot find a way to fit through the wall, they are pushed into a pool of water.

Human Tetris emerged on the Japanese game show known as “Tunnels No Minasan No Okagedeshita”. Contestants on the show are grouped into teams, usually the Blue and Red team. The goal of the teams is to squeeze themselves through a pink foam wall, which sometimes has human-like shapes in it. If they cannot find a way to fit through the wall as it lurches towards them, they are pushed into a pool of water.

Human Tetris website also contains sexy bikini girls version of the show, where sexy girls are contestants.

The “Human Tetris” feature of the “Tunnels no Minasan no Okage Deshita” show has become so popular that the Australian TV show “Big Brother” in season 3 of its Australian TV series produced their own version of the skit for an episode of their show. The Spanish TV copied the show as ‘Nadie es Perfecto’ and the Italian TV made the sexy bikini girls version of the show but none of them are as funny as the original show.

The human tetris show is also known as Haneru No Tobira, Tunnels no Minasan no Okage Desu, Tunnels no minasan no okage Deshita and Tonneruzu no mina-san no Okage desu.

Human Tetris

2008-12-03T14:38:00.000-08:00

Tetris DS

2008-12-02T04:19:00.000-08:00

There is a distinct chance that, were it not for Tetris, there would not be a Nintendo DS. Though there were superior versions of Alexei Pajitnov's elegant and dangerously addictive puzzle game available on other platforms, Tetris for the original Game Boy was the reason to buy Nintendo's first handheld. Considering the significance of Tetris to Nintendo's handheld legacy, it's a little surprising that it took this long for it to show up on the DS. Tetris DS features a great variety of gameplay variants and online play, and is absolutely smothered in 8-bit Nintendo nostalgia; yet the package makes enough minor, obvious mistakes to keep it from being absolutely essential.

Tetris DS hopes that you like thinking about old Nintendo games while you play Tetris.

We're just going to assume here that you've played Tetris before--however, for those who haven't played Tetris since it was rendered in green-and-grey on the Game Boy, some changes have been made to the formula. Top of the list is the introduction of the hold box, which lets you take the active piece in play and put it to the side for later use; it can be a lifesaver when you have a piece that won't fit snugly into your playfield, or when you're setting yourself up for a four-line Tetris. Another less obvious and more damaging change is the infinite spin. This was a "feature" we first discovered in THQ's Tetris Worlds, where, even when a piece had touched down, you could keep it in play by constantly rotating it. It's a genuinely awful thing, though the infinite spin issue honestly really affects only a few of the single-player gameplay modes in Tetris DS, because any competitive mode requires you to lay down pieces as quickly as humanly possible. It's still incredibly bothersome that this quirk seems to be on its way to becoming Tetris canon.

There's also the hard drop, which will instantly place the piece in play at the bottom of the playfield when you tap up on the D pad, as well as the ghost piece, which shows a translucent projection of the piece in play on the bottom of the playfield. Both of these are pretty minor and can actually be turned off, though oddly, the hold box and the infinite spin cannot. The general lack of customization is rather glaring throughout Tetris DS. Sure, there's a number of unique gameplay modes here, but by simply including the option to let the player tweak some of the settings, that number could have increased exponentially.

What's even more immediately striking than these fundamental gameplay tweaks is the presentation of Tetris DS, as Nintendo has plastered the game with all kinds of classic 8-bit Nintendo sights and sounds. It covers the basics with themes based on Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, and Metroid, though it also includes themes based on less well-known properties like Excitebike, Balloon Fight, and Yoshi's Cookie. Ultimately, the biggest problem with the presentation is that it banks too much on nostalgia, and frankly, we don't always want to listen to the Super Mario Bros. music on loop while we play Tetris. A lot of the themes are inexorably linked to specific gameplay modes, which means that if you don't much care for a certain piece of music, you're going to want to stay away from certain modes.

The single-player game is divvied up into six different styles of play, many of which contain several distinct modes. Standard Tetris is about as close to vanilla Tetris as you'll find in Tetris DS, and the modes contained within it are, well, pretty standard. Marathon challenges you to clear 200 lines, line clear lets you set the drop speed and the number of uncleared lines you start with, and VS CPU puts you up against some artificial intelligence that quickly goes from grade school to diabolical Tetris mastermind. Push, which can be played against the CPU or a live opponent, puts an interesting spin on standard two-player Tetris by having both players share the same baseline. Clearing lines pushes the baseline closer to the top of your opponent's field (which, from your perspective, looks like the bottom of your own field) until one of you runs out of room.

The touch style will have you pulling out your stylus and using it to slide around and rotate pieces that are already on the playfield in order to clear lines. Touch features two modes. Tower presents you with a massive pile of jumbled-up pieces that you'll have to clear in order to bring precious freedom to a cage of balloons--yup, balloons--while touch puzzle gives you a relatively limited number of pieces to work with, but challenges you to completely clear out the entire playfield, and without the ability to rotate pieces. While identifiable as Tetris only because of the familiarity of the piece shapes, both of the touch modes can be fun, though the touch puzzle mode provides an especially satisfying, and occasionally maddening, challenge. There's also a non-touch puzzle mode, in which you're presented with a field with a number of lines already on it, and then given a few specific pieces to use in order to completely clear the field. There are 200 unique puzzles, which slowly but surely increase in complexity, and they can be just as crazymaking as the touch puzzles.

The mission style, which can be played in a marathon or time trial mode, starts off like a regular game of Tetris, though simply clearing lines isn't enough to advance you. While your playfield resides on the lower screen, the top screen presents you with specific tasks that you must complete in order to advance. Sometimes you'll need to clear a number of lines with a single, specific piece, sometimes you'll need to clear one line without rotating any pieces--whatever the challenge, if you don't do it in a timely manner, the game will punish you by adding lines to the bottom of the field. Though superb for sharpening your Tetris chops, it can also be confusing, as some of the task descriptions aren't completely concise, and some of the tasks themselves can just be totally frustrating to actually pull off.

Lastly, there's catch, which only barely resembles Tetris--though, unlike the touch games, catch just isn't much fun. You're given a four-block core that you can move and rotate at will on the lower screen, while pieces slowly descend from the top screen. When they reach the lower screen, you can attach them to your core just by letting them touch down. The goal here is to create solid four-by-four sets of blocks, which when created will explode, simultaneously advancing your score and bringing the size of your cluster back down to a manageable one. Things get complicated as more pieces start to fall along with block-destroying obstacles, but the pacing never really speeds up adequately, and the whole thing just starts to feel like a grind.

A few of the modes mentioned have multiplayer components as well, and you can play standard, mission, and push games against other players locally--best of all, the other players don't even need to have copies of the game. Tetris DS features some of the best game sharing we've seen on the Nintendo DS, allowing up to 10 people to participate in massive, competitive games of Tetris. The local multiplayer is also one of the few places in Tetris DS where you can actually make modifications to the rules, most notably the ability to form between two teams of five and five teams of two, and the ability to turn on or off items. The items, which can have positive and negative effects ranging from giving you nothing but straight pieces for a limited time to preventing an opponent from rotating their pieces, can be picked up by clearing lines that contains special flashing blocks, and can be stored until you activate them with the X button.

Sure, it's the only online puzzle game for the DS, but it still feels like a missed opportunity.

The local multiplayer is hands down the best thing going for Tetris DS, which should say a lot about the quality of the game's online multiplayer. Yes, Tetris DS is online-enabled, though it's kind of underwhelming, since there are only three different modes, none of which you can modify. There's standard two-player, two-player push, and standard four-player with items. You want to play a two-player game, but with items? Or maybe you want to play a three-player game? With Tetris DS, you're out of luck. For what it's worth, the online experience worked well enough, but by comparison to the local multiplayer offered, it just seems poorly realized.

Tetris DS has a lot going for it--plenty of gameplay modes, amazing game sharing, and online play--which makes it all the more disappointing that it contains no "pure" Tetris experience, and features a weak selection of online gameplay modes. But still, it's Tetris, one of the most popular and significant puzzle games ever, and some of the magic that put it in such a venerable position still manages to shine through.

Tetris Party (Wii)

2008-12-02T04:05:00.000-08:00

Ask yourself the following question: How many times, over the course of your life, have you bought a version of Tetris? Two? Five? A dozen? Tetris is about as ubiquitous a game as has ever existed. It singlehandedly defines an entire genre — when people are trying to describe an action-puzzler, they say, “You know, like Tetris.” It has appeared on every conceivable system known to man (I had Tetris on my graphing calculator so I could ignore my calculus teacher). Type the word “Tetris” into Google and you will be playing any of a thousand free flash versions of the game inside of 3 minutes. Every single person who has ever touched a gaming system knows how to play Tetris, and has likely spent several hours doing so.

So, after nearly 25 years and countless versions, how is it that Tetris is still a commercially viable product? The answer is simple: Because it’s freaking Tetris. I’m not going to insult you by suggesting we should be sick of Tetris by now; Tetris is timeless. We will still be enjoying Tetris long after we’ve forgotten games like Halo or Grand Theft Auto.

The question is, knowing that there’s plenty of ways to now play Tetris for free, is there a reason to spend 1200 Wii Points on Tetris Party? Hudson Soft’s new WiiWare take on the title certainly brings plenty of new wrinkles and gimmicks along for the ride. Not all of these gimmicks are winners, but there are areas where Tetris Party gets it right — and those areas are worth a visit.

Allow me to get the negative points out of the way first: It’s important to note a couple of caveats up front, when it comes to considering the feature set of Tetris Party. Hudson’s marketing materials paint an impressive picture, promising things like “18 game modes” and “use the Wii Balance Board to play Tetris in a whole new way.” Let’s cut some of the hype out of those: Those 18 choices count a number of modes twice, counting the single-player and vs. versions of the same mode as two different games. In addition, several of the modes simply aren’t very good, and as for the Wii Balance Board… well, you’ll try it out once to see the amusing gimmick, get bored after two minutes, and never bother with it again. Make no mistake, I mean it when I say there’s some genuine fun to be had in Tetris Party — but the game comes with a lot of empty, tacked-on content as well, attempting to fool the unwary gamer into believing he’s getting a much greater value.

I won’t waste your time, in this review, explaining how to play Tetris. If you’re reading this, you already know, and if you don’t know, you need to get out less. As one would expect, Tetris Party comes with the standard “Marathon” mode, the undiluted and original experience. Tetris Party (Balance Board modes notwithstanding) is played in the classic method, with the WiiMote on its side in the pad-and-buttons controller posture; the Classic Controller is also usable. Marathon mode comes with all the typical trappings: It can be played in endless mode, up to a specific number of lines, or up to a time limit. The graphics and sound are nice and unintrusive, including a variety of pleasant but undistracting backgrounds, and a broad variety of easy-listening BGM tracks, all of which will speed up dynamically as the pace of the game increases. The difficulty curve is set just where it should be, with a sense of urgency finally rolling in around level 10, and genuine difficulty arriving around level 15. Toss in a few Mii integrations, and you’ve got an excellent core package for your classic Tetris experience. Of course, in order to be worth your while, there needs to be more than just Marathon — as we mentioned, you can get that part of the game, for free, almost anywhere.

So, let’s take a look at the extra modes, beginning with the other single-player offerings:
Computer Battle: If you’ve played Tetris head-to-head before, you know what this is. Considering the game also has a VS Battle mode, where you can set your opponent to be the computer, this mode is redundant.
Field Climber: This is a genuinely interesting concept, disappointingly marred by buggy execution and seemingly arbitrary rules. In Field Climber, your playing field is occupied by a tiny little man, and your job is to guide him through a few flags scattered about the field, and ultimately get him to the top of the screen. In order to do this, you must drop the tetrominoes in such a way that the man can climb them — he can scale a vertical obstacle that’s one block high, but anything more than that will block him. In theory, it’s a great game — the player is forced to strategize about where to build his tower, and can clear lines to erase his mistakes. In practice, however, you will find yourself cursing at the little man, who insists on moving directly under the blocks you’re trying to place, and then boggling when dropping a block directly on top of him does not generate a game over (as it’s supposed to, according to the rules), instead letting you cheat your way to the top by making the man appear on top of blocks you just crushed him with. Time and time again, I was able to cheat my way through these levels by dropping new structures in places the man would not logically be able to climb, only to watch him appear harmlessly on top of them.
Shadow: A more puzzle-oriented mode, Shadow challenges you to fill in the indicated areas with falling tetrominoes (as well as smaller pieces of 1, 2, or 3 blocks) to form a predetermined shape, such as an apple, or a pencil collection, or Bomberman. The challenge lies in the ticking clock, the fact that you can only opt to skip a limited number of ill-fitting pieces per attempt, and the fact that your score is penalized for every block you place that doesn’t fit the shadow. This is an enjoyable mode, if frustrating at times due to the random blocks — which never fit the holes you need them to, naturally.
Stage Racer: This mode puts you in control of a single tetromino, and has you guide it through a pre-set “race track” of other blocks, guiding it from side to side and often performing complicated rotations to get through narrow gaps. As an instructional experience to learn a few advanced Tetris moves to fill small gaps in Marathon mode, it’s an interesting academic exercise. As a game, it’s worthless.
Beginner’s Tetris: Narrows the playing field to 5 columns, takes out the difficult tetrominoes (such as the Z and S), and gives you some smaller, 2 or 3-square, easier ones. This is great if you have a toddler, but the average gamer will grow bored almost instantly.

Wii Balance Board Tetris: Swapping out the Wiimote for the Balance Board, this mode allows you to control the game with your body, shifting your weight around to make the necessary moves. Leaning left and right will move the tetromino left and right, leaning forward or backward will drop the tetromino faster, and squatting quickly will rotate it. It’s not quite a full-body workout, but it’s cute, and good for a brief amusement — but that’s it. In truth, this mode could almost have been an enjoyable game — players would be challenged to keep control over their balance not to over-slide a piece, and at higher levels, might require some downright fancy footwork. Instead, however, the actual gameplay that’s tied to the Balance Board mode is the aforementioned Beginner’s Tetris, with the five-column field, an even shorter field height-wise, and even fewer tetrominoes. The game has been dumbed down so far to make up for the unfamiliar Balance Board controls as to present a nearly pointless experience, ensuring players will become instantly bored once the novelty wears off.

With the single-player offerings largely on the unimpressive side, Tetris Party isn’t sounding like much of a game at this point, but one doesn’t put the word “Party” in the title unless one intends to include some solid multiplayer options. It’s in these portions, thankfully, that Tetris Party begins to shine. The game supports local play with up to four Wiimotes (as well as CPU players to fill the gaps), with Wi-Fi play for up to six players, and these modes are definitely more hit than miss:
VS Battle: Again, if you’ve ever played a head-to-head Tetris game since the days of the original Game Boy, you know what to expect here. Clearing several lines will cause extra rows of detritus to stack up underneath your opponent’s playing field, and each of you have to worry about faster tetrominoes as the match wears on. Tetris Party, however, adds a few chaotic wrinkles into the mix, allowing for extra lines to be sent via consecutive clears, and also allows the optional use of several game-altering “items.” A well-timed bonus item can allow you to speed up only your opponent’s pieces, fire several blocks onto his playing field by aiming the Wiimote, or even completely obscure his vision until he shakes his own Wiimote. In addition, the inclusion of up to four players can turn the game into pure, entertaining chaos — it’s one thing to deal with the extra blocks from an opponent’s tetris, it’s quite another matter when three opponents all touch off a tetris or trigger an item in quick succession.
VS Field Climber: The addition of items and the urgency of racing against other players (rather than the clock) certainly improves this mode, but it doesn’t change the fact that you can exploit the buggy climber to cheat your way to victory.
VS Hot Lines: The playing field is marked by glowing lines, and the first player to clear all of theirs, wins. The experience pits you more against yourself than your opponents, since detritus is no longer sent over through cleared lines, but this mode certainly provides for a fun race — with a little chaos thrown in, if you keep using items.
VS Shadow: This may well be my favorite mode, apart from the party-oriented chaos of the standard VS Battle. This game mode is really something unique: The best way to describe it is “puzzle chicken.” As in the single-player Shadow mode, the object of the game is to drop your tetrominoes inside of a bordered area to create a specific shape. This time, however, you’re going up against up to 3 other players, and the most accurate score wins. All scores start at 0%, and while every correctly-placed block will inch you closer to 100%, every block that falls outside the border knocks a few points off of your possible maximum score. If a player is able to complete the shadow perfectly, and reach 100%, the game instantly ends, but given the random nature of the available pieces, this very rarely actually happens. Instead, players will be scrambling to tidy up their fields, working to raise their scores without making too much of a penalizing mess, because once the timer runs out, the highest percentage wins. It’s possible, in fact, to end your game prematurely, and aim for victory that way: If you stack the tetrominoes off the top of the field, your timer stops and your score is frozen. Of course, if you had a very high score at this point, this may hand you the win — in the event of a tie, victory will go to the player who had 95% with 30 seconds to spare, rather than the player who had 95% when time ran out. The underlying strategy of this mode — which nobody actually has time to think about, in the face of the short timer — makes it a real gem.
VS Stage Racer: Unless you feel like bringing another player or two along for this purely academic mode, don’t bother.
Co-Op Tetris: Now, here’s something new. This mode doubles the width of the playing field, gives two players each their own queue of tetrominoes, and lets them both drop pieces at once in an otherwise regular Marathon setting. It sounds easier than it really is — if you don’t remain aware of what your partner is doing at all times, you can make a mess of things very quickly, dropping pieces where there’s suddenly no room, finishing a line that your partner may have been saving for a tetris, and so on. This mode is great with someone you know very well, especially once the speed starts ramping up and the two of you start trying to assign responsibilities. The phrase “I thought that was your side!” has not come up so much since Virtua Tennis.
Duel Spaces: This is an interesting addition — a competitive, turn-based, territory control game, like Ataxx, only with tetrominoes. As a piece falls, one player decides its placement, earning a point for each space it takes up, plus one point for every empty square that is now irrevocably blocked off. Simple to learn, and great for a five-minute head-to-head puzzle.

Clearly, the real effort in Tetris Party went into the social modes, and it shows — the game is a fairly bland offering for the solo player, but if you’ve got a few friends on hand and some spare Wiimotes, you’re in business. Of course, players who are short on Wiimotes — or actual friends — have Tetris Party’s Wi-Fi mode to bridge the gap, right? Not quite, I’m sorry to say. The Wi-Fi mode, more than anything, comes up disappointingly short, especially in light of what might have been, with a little more effort.

It’s easy to blame many of the Wi-Fi shortcomings on Nintendo’s usual user-unfriendly sttructural decisions. Tetris Party does nothing to advance Nintendo’s lousy online services: Friend Codes are certainly included, and despite the appearance of your Mii face above your playing field, playing with strangers is a wholly impersonal experience — your communication is restricted to a handful of pre-approved chat messages, so get ready for the usual “Hello!” and “Let’s Play!” routine. Lag is a problem, as well — which is rather baffling, considering the minimal data needed to communicate progress in a game of Tetris. On more than one occasion, I had filled my playing field to the top, thus ending my game — only to watch my opponent continue playing, and ultimately fill his field to the top, inexplicably handing me a victory fully five seconds after I had lost the ability to play by generating a losing condition.

Still, taking some solace in the knowledge that you’re beating actual humans instead of CPU players in VS Battles can be satisfying, and the addition of ratings and records brings some fun to the obsessive and/or competitive player. On the other hand, I hope VS Battle is your favorite mode, because it’s the only one you’re going to be playing. This is Tetris Party’s greatest disappointment; every other multiplayer mode has been omitted from online play. I would have loved to play Duel Spaces or VS Shadow against three other online players; even getting to compare a Hot Lines time in a face-off setting would be fun. I can understand that latency might make something like Co-Op Tetris impossible, but come on — Duel Spaces is turn-based. There is no reason not to include it, and yet, it’s missing. Wi-Fi could have really made Tetris Party a must-own title, but instead, we can only truly recommend it for those who have the friends and resources to enjoy some local play.

If you have those friends and resources, though, Tetris Party will provide you with some good, clean, block-dropping fun. So, go ahead — ask yourself how many times you’ve bought Tetris over the years. And then, remember why that number is as high as it is… and add one more to the total.

Tetris Party is available now via WiiWare.

Tiny

2008-11-29T06:34:00.001-08:00

|PLAY|

Tetris for iPod/iPhone

2008-11-29T04:56:00.000-08:00

Electronic Arts Tetris

By Jeremy Horwitz

As launch day buyers of Nintendo's original 1989 Game Boys, we're on record as being long-time fans of Tetris, the Russian block-dropping game that helped to spark a portable gaming revolution and created an entire genre of similar puzzle titles. We've also enjoyed many of the game's official sequels and semi-sequels, particularly the excellent titles Bombliss and Tetrisphere, but none of them have stopped us from going back and enjoying the game that started it all. Now the iPod has its own version of Tetris ($5), and there's somewhat good news for newcomers to the series.

Developer Electronic Arts has given Tetris a sweeping audiovisual overhaul. Strong blue menus and cool translucent overlays make the interface attractive, while the in-game art - famously rendered entirely usable on the Game Boy’s black and white screen - is detailed and colorful, with vibrant blocks and clean backdrops. The 10 by 20 block well is clearly illustrated block-by-block for strategic block placement, while the blocks have highlighted edges that look ever-so-slightly three-dimensional. EA has also remixed the classic Tetris music, adding a more modern techno air to the the old Russian soundtrack, though you can no longer select from several songs at the start - a sad omission given the game’s musical roots, and the iPod’s.

The only bad news here is, like Pac-Man, in the controls. Rather than trying to emulate a joystick or joypad with two buttons - the default way to play Tetris since its inception - EA lets you move left and right by sweeping your finger in a rotary fashion on the Click Wheel, and rotates blocks with clicks on the Click Wheel’s left and right sides. Down drops the block instantly to the bottom, while the Center action button moves the block downwards at a pace faster than gravity but slower than the down button. In a phrase, this control scheme is sub-optimal - rotating with buttons and moving left and right with a rotary controller really doesn’t make sense - and begs for user-selectable control schemes. For no good reason, this default control scheme takes time to get used to, and still doesn’t really feel right once you’ve spent time with it, though we found it more tolerable overall than with Pac-Man.

In our view, Tetris is a gimme of a game title for virtually any system, particularly when it’s been blessed with improved graphics and music, but on the iPod, its great looks and sounds are undercut by an unnecessarily mediocre control scheme. If you’re willing to adjust the way you’ve played Tetris before - something we wouldn’t do - you’ll get more enjoyment out of this title than we did.

iPhone/iPod touch Version

Out of all the revised Click Wheel iPod Games we’ve tried on the iPhone, Electronic Arts’ Tetris is definitely the best. Unlike Scrabble and Sudoku, which the company ported with little thought or attention to the iPhone platform, Tetris has received a huge overhaul from the original iPod game. The Tetris well is now bigger, more detailed, and more colorfully framed than before, with cool little touches of animation during level-to-level transitions; similarly, the music is better, more upbeat, and interestingly composed. We miss the original Nintendo Game Boy Tetris’s user-selectable music—a hint of the best old tune appears in a nicely animated introduction to EA’s iPhone version—but what’s here is actually quite good.

The big news here, however, isn’t audiovisual; it’s the gameplay. EA should really have considered christening this title with a new name like Tetris Touch, as it’s a few steps beyond the original game in terms of interactivity. You can play the classic block-dropping game as everyone knows it, or you can enter Magic mode, where a collection of new touchscreen-friendly powers have been added to the game: one transforms the whole board into bubblewrap to let you pop problematic blocks, another lets you draw the block of your choice to replace whatever’s currently dropping, another lets you shake the iPhone to eliminate empty spaces, and still another drops wrecking balls around to crush whatever you shake them into touching. These tricks add a lot of fun to the classic Tetris formula, and a Holding area—a place where you can store one block for deployment at a time of your choice—further improves the experience.

If there are any issues with the new version of Tetris, they’re two: the touch controls and pricing. EA’s gesture-based control over the blocks works wonderfully most of the time—better than the ill-fated original version of Tetris for the iPod 5G—but there are times when you’ll accidentally quick-drop a block when trying to bring it down gently, thanks to overly similar finger motions that should be differentiated. Additionally, the $10 price remains pricey given the range of great $5 iPhone titles out there. But given how much EA has done to really make good use of the iPhone and render a once-great title even better for this device, we think the premium here is as close to worth it as we’ve yet seen. The new version of Tetris is highly recommended.

Vadim Gerasimov

2008-11-28T13:11:00.001-08:00

Vadim Gerasimov is an engineer at Google. In 1994-2003 Vadim worked and studied at the MIT Media Lab. At age 16 he was one of the original co-developers of the famous video game Tetris: he ported Alexey Pajitnov's original game to the PC architecture and the two later added features to the game. Vadim earned a BS/MS in applied mathematics from Moscow State University in 1992 and a Ph.D. from MIT in 2003.

Education
Ph.D., MIT, 2003
MS in Media Arts and Sciences, MIT, 1996
MS, BS in applied mathematics, Moscow State University, Russia, 1992

Experience
Oct 2007 - Present Engineer, Google Australia

Oct 2006 - Oct 2007 Research Scientist, Emotiv Systems Pty Ltd, Sydney, Australia

2003 - 2006 Research Scientist, Postdoc, CSIRO ICT Centre, Sydney, Australia

1994 - 2003 Postdoc, Research Assistant, Student, MIT Media Laboratory, Cambridge, MA, USA

1984 - 1994 Junior Scientist, Programmer, Consultant at Computer Center of Academy of Sciences of USSR (Russia) and Soglasie Ltd

PROJECTS AT EMOTIV SYSTEMS
1. 2006-2007 Sensor technology research and development Researched, designed, and implemented a technology that is expected to be included in the product, but has not been publicly announced. A co-inventor on the corresponding provisional US patent application.

PROJECTS AT CSIRO
1. 2003-2004 Software system to model and visualize 3D or 2D self-assembly of groups of autonomous agents. The system makes a physically accurate estimate of the interaction of agents represented as rigid cubic or tetrahedral structures with variable electrostatic charges on the faces and vertices. Local events cause the agents’ charges to change according to user-defined rules or rules generated by genetic algorithms. The system is used as an experimental environment for theoretical and practical study of autonomous agent self-assembly. The software system will be applied to the analysis, prediction and design of self-assembly behavior of agents from atomic- to macro-scales. In particular, it will be a platform for developing design techniques that can be implemented in real nano-scale systems to achieve useful structures.

2. 2003-2006 Distributed Energy Concept Demonstration System I participate in design of a web-based system to explore and demonstrate the potential for control of distributed energy production and demand.

PROJECTS AT MEDIA LABORATORY
1. 1999-2003 Every Sign of Life (Ph.D. project) http://vadim.oversigma.com/esl/esl.html This is an exploration of how to make personal health data gathering and analysis fun and engaging, and consequently more useful to the non-specialist. The approach is to design and build computer games and scenarios based on health data. In support of the project, I designed a compact personal health-monitoring device that stores EKG, respiration, temperature and other parameters on a CompactFlash card or sends them wirelessly to a nearby computer. This device is also being used in experiments at the University of Rochester Medical School.

2. 2000-2003 Hoarder board http://vadim.oversigma.com/Hoarder/Hoarder.htm Universal data collection board. Open design for data collection projects. Originally made for Every Sign of Life project. Status: specs, report, and demo available

3. 2001 WaveScan http://vadim.oversigma.com/WaveScan/WaveScan.htmProgram to get signal/noise strength from 802.11 cards. Status: demo and short report available on the web

4. 2000-2003 WebCam Window view display program with time-lapse and weather information. Shows full-screen real-time view from window captured by web camera. For offices and public spaces without windows. Status: active in several places at Media Lab

5. 1999 Information processing in human body - class project (MAS.862 Prof. Neil Gershenfeld) http://vadim.oversigma.com/MAS862/Project.html Factoids about information processes in human body.

6. 1998-2000 Hand-held Doctor for Children http://vadim.oversigma.com/hhd/hhd.html The goal of this project was to create a toy for children that would help them to better understand how their bodies work. I designed a small microcontroller-based device and a set of sensors to measure pulse, breathing, temperature, and skin conductivity, and to send the measured signals to a personal computer or a toy. Children played with cartoon characters that visualized these signals and built Lego robots of their own design that were controlled by these signals. Children were able to explore how physiological parameters changed when they stood, sat, walked, ran, or slept. A group of children also used the toy to explore the principles of lie detection. Status: demo available.

7. 1998 Sound Game Game without visual input. Status: demo available, brief report in http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/393/part1/gerasimov.html

8. 1998-2001 Color in Media Technology class projects (MAS.815 Prof. Walter Bender) http://vadim.oversigma.com/MAS815/mas815.html Set of applications in Java, Delphi, C++ to demonstrate various aspects of color and set of functions to work with Munsell color set. Status: demo available

9. 1998 Wireless sensor input board Designed 4-AD-channel data acquisition board with RF transmitter. The board was used in Swings That Think and Hand-held Doctor for Children projects. Status: demo available

10. 1998-1999 Calm Alarm http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/393/part1/gerasimov.html Exploration of non-obtrusive alarms. Status: demo not available, partially published in http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/393/part1/gerasimov.html

11. 1997 Tetris on the Green Building http://vadim.oversigma.com/games/gbt.html Game in Java. Same program helped to pick windows for the hack http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/1998/oscar_greenspeak Status: available on the web

12. 1997 Audio Processing class project (MAS.641 Prof. Barry Vercoe) System that demonstrates spatial sound perception and new (designed for class) concept of head-tracking headphones with gyroscope. Status: demo available

13. 1996-1998 Swings That Think http://vadim.oversigma.com/stt/bat.html The goal of this project was to provide real-time motion analysis and audio, tactile, or visual feedback to the user engaged in a task that requires coordination of body movements, and possibly some extra body affordance (e.g., a golf club, tennis racket, fishing pole, or baseball bat). The devices performed three functions: sensing, analyzing, and providing feedback to the user. Specifically, I designed a system to assist softball players in improving their batting technique. Sensors inside of the bat and on the player's body provided information about the bat's trajectory and player's motion during each swing. The system provided in vivo audio feedback and recommendations on improving the swing. Status: demo available

14. 1996 Acoustic data transfer from Timex watch Reverse engineered Timex DataLink watch to put program that sends data back to PC using sound. Status: demo available

15. 1996-1998 HBDL (Handy Board Download) http://handyboard.com Loads software into The Handy Board (small MC6811-based computer designed at Media Lab). Status: used at MIT robot design competitions and by others who have/use The Handy Boards.

16. 1995 Modeling Nature class projects (MAS.864 Prof. Neil Gershenfeld) http://vadim.oversigma.com/MAS864/mn.htm Set of applications to demonstrate concepts of mathematical modeling. Status: demo available

17. 1995-1996 Things That Talk http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/393/part1/gerasimov.html Explored possibilities of acoustic communication for small devices.

18. 1994 Uniframing - The Society of Mind class project (MAS.731 Prof. Marvin Minsky) Implementation of uniframing concept from book. Program worked, uniframing didn't. Status: demo available

19. 1994 Web Rubic's Cube http://vadim.www.media.mit.edu:8000/cube.htm Interactive Rubic's cube implemented before scripting and Java were available. Compiled as a part of web server. Status: works

20. 1994 Http Server http://vadim.www.media.mit.edu:8000 Borland Pascal implementation of web server to support News games and other precompiled functions. Status: active (runs as NT service)

21. 1994 News Games http://vadim.www.media.mit.edu:8000/newsttl.htm Designed set of computer games to make reading and sharing news more entertaining. News Totalizer - web based event-guessing betting game. Paragraph - paragraph scrambling news reader. News Worms - text worm game. Status: demo available

COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS

22. 1999 Component software: principles and practice. MIT IAP-99 class. http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/szummer/personal/components/iap.html Together with Martin Szummer taught this class. Prepared seminars on OLE, COM, ActiveX.

23. 1999 Damasio revisited - Affective Computing class project (MAS.630 Prof. Rozalind Picard) http://vadim.oversigma.com/Damasio/Damasio.html Software and hardware developed by me. Interaction with experiment subjects and report by Roy Rodenstein. Status: demo available

24. 1998 Project Bear - Systems and Self class project (MAS.714 Prof. Mitchel Resnick) http://vadim.oversigma.com/ProjectBear/Info.html Artifact design project. Made by 6 people including me.

25. 1996 Vadims http://www.vadims.co.jp/ Game published by ITC Inc for Sony Playstation in Japan

26. 1998-2000 Demo machine Designed electronics and mechanics for demo slot machine. User could drop RF ID chip with picture of project into newspaper stand to get to project’s web site. Stand had computer with display inside. PC software installed and maintained by Walter Bender and his other students. Status: disassembled

27. 1999 Spacewars Typed in a part of the program for: http://spacewar.oversigma.com

EARLIER WORK EXPERIENCE

1992-1993 software engineer, consultant, Soglasie Ltd, Moscow, Russia

Assisted in design and implementation of hardware and software for the Central Hospital of the Russian Ministry of Defense.

1990 with group of 3 other people started company Soglasie Ltd in Moscow, Russia. Company’s objective was to design and manufacture domestic computer hardware and work on software and hardware projects for other organizations. http://eng.tradition.ru

1984-1991 programmer, Computer Center of Academy of Sciences of USSR, Moscow, Russia

Designed and developed computer games including Tetris. Wrote copy- and virus- protection software. Worked on reverse engineering of computer systems.

PATENTS

V. Gerasimov, Heart Rate Monitor. US Patent 7,139,605

S. Mahajan, V. Gerasimov, A. Mehta, and Z. LaValley, Method and apparatus for determining orientation and position of a moveable object. US Patent Application 20050032582

R. Breen and V.Gerasimov (2006) US Provisional Patent Application

PUBLICATIONS

V. Gerasimov, G. Healy, M. Prokopenko, P. Wang, and A. Zeman. Symbiotic Sensor Networks in Complex Underwater Terrains: a Simulation Framework. To appear at KES2006 10th International Conference on Knowledge-Based & Intelligent Information & Engineering Systems. Bournemouth UK, October 2006.

M. Prokopenko, V. Gerasimov, and I. Tanev. Evolving Spatiotemporal Coordination in a Modular Robotic System. To appear at the Ninth International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB'06), Rome, Italy, September 2006.

Y. Guo, V. Gerasimov, and G. Poulton. Vision-Based Drivable Surface Detection in Autonomous Ground Vehicles. To appear at IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS2006). Beijing, China, October 2006.

V. Gerasimov, Y. Guo, G. James, and G. Poulton. Physically Realistic Self-assembly Simulation System. In A. Abraham, C. Grosan, and V. Ramos (Eds.), Stigmergic Optimization, Series: Studies in Computational Intelligence, Vol. 31, Springer-Verlag, ISBN: 3-540-34689-9, pages 117-130, Hardcover, 2006.

M. Prokopenko, V. Gerasimov, and I. Tanev. Measuring Spatiotemporal Coordination in a Modular Robotic System. The 10th International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (ALifeX). Bloomington IN, USA, June 2006.

M. Prokopenko, P. Wang, A. Scott, V. Gerasimov, N. Hoschke, and D. Price. On Self-organising Diagnostics in Impact Sensing Networks. In R. Khosla, R. J. Howlett, and L. C. Jain, editors, Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, 9th International Conference, KES 2005, Melbourne, Australia, September 14-16, 2005, Proceedings, Part IV, volume 3684 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 170-178, 2005.

A. Saxena, G. Gupta, V. Gerasimov, and S. Ourselin. In Use Parameter Estimation of Inertial Sensors by Detecting Multilevel Quasi-Static States. In Ninth International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information & Engineering Systems(KES'05), LNCS, Melbourne, Australia, pages 595 - 601,vol. 3684, August 2005. Springer Verlag.

V. Gerasimov, Y. Guo, G. James, G. Poulton, and P. Valencia (2004) Multiagent Self-assembly Simulation Environment. 3rd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems (AAMAS-2004), New York, July 2004.

G. Poulton, Y. Guo, G. James, P. Valencia, V. Gerasimov, and J. Li (2004) Directed Self-Assembly of 2-Dimensional Mesoblocks using Top-down/Bottom-up Design. 2nd International Workshop on Engineering Self-Organising Applications (ESOA'04), New York, July 2004.

K. Taylor, J. Ward, V. Gerasimov, and G. James (2004) Sensor/Actuator Networks supporting Agents for Distributed Energy Management. Accepted by the First IEEE Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors (EmNetS-I).

V. Gerasimov (2003) Every Sign of Life. Ph.D. thesis. MIT program in Media Arts and Sciences http://vadim.oversigma.com/thesis.pdf

V. Gerasimov, T. Selker and W. Bender (2002) Sensing and Effecting Environment with Extremity Computing Devices. Offspring Vol 1, No 1 http://vadim.oversigma.com/Papers/Extremity.pdf

V. Gerasimov (2001) Hoarder Board. http://vadim.oversigma.com/Hoarder/Hoarder.htm

V. Gerasimov and W. Bender (2000) Things that talk: Using sound for device-to-device and device-to-human communication. IBM Systems Journal Vol 39, No 3&4, pp 530-546 http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/393/part1/gerasimov.html

V. Gerasimov and R. Rodenstein (1999) Damasio Revisited. http://vadim.oversigma.com/Damasio/Damasio.html

V. Gerasimov (1998) Information Processing in Human Body. http://vadim.oversigma.com/MAS862/Project.html

V. Gerasimov (1996) Things That Talk. Master’s thesis. MIT program in Media Arts and Sciences http://vadim.oversigma.com/TTT_Paper/TTT.html

V. Gerasimov (2000) Hand-held doctor for children. Presentation at FHT2000 http://www.fhti.org

V. Gerasimov and W. Bender (1999) Calm alarm – non-obtrusive sound signals for personal communication devices. Prepared for CHI-2000.

V. Gerasimov and W. Bender (1999) Hand-held doctor for children. Short paper prepared for CHI-99. http://vadim.oversigma.com/hhd/HHD.pdf

V. Gerasimov (1997) Biomedia http://vadim.oversigma.com/Papers/Biomedia.pdf

Source: Wikipedia, vadim.oversigma.com

Game Boy Tetris

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Quad Tetris

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Soldiers Tetris

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Slang

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TETRIBATE - To engage in solo Tetris playing.

TETRIGASM - The euphoric sensation resulting from high altitude Tetris attacks, and often the Rapage of the Rectum with the Cock Piece and the defeat of one's opponent. Take your most enjoyable orgasm... multiply it by a thousand. And you're not even close.

PREMATURE TETRACULATION - Occurs in a game that ends very quickly, usually before a player can get a sufficient number of lines. Officially, Premature Tetraculation has occured if you lose having depleted less than ten lines.

EXCHANGING PHONE NUMBERS - Simultaneous Tetrising between both opponents. This is the rapid exchange of Tetris, either occuring directly simultaneously, or in quick succession. Also known as "Tetris Tag."

TETRANCE - The state where a player is zoned into the game of Tetris and regards Tetris as the most important thing at that moment, often to the point of blocking out surroundings. It is quite possible for spectators of a game to be in Tetrance, even though they are not playing the game.

SODA POPINSKI - Fictional, legendary boxer and Tetris competitor. A mythical player; to refer to one's move as "like Popinski," "Popinski-like," "Popinkski-esque," or "Soda," is a great compliment.

Example:
Player One: "Dude, that move was totally Soda!"
Player Two: "Utmost gratitude, friend."

BUILDING SCULPTURES or BEING AN ARCHITECT or ARCHITECTING - Layering of blocks in an unorthodox, yet often aestheticly pleasing, manner. Indeed, this is usually considered harmful to the player's ability to win.

BUILDING/CONSTRUCTING CASTLE(S)/CASTLE WALLS - The phenomenon that occurs with a visual look similar to that of a castle. In these instances, there is no feasable place for an Ass Block (or L-piece) when it visits!

"T" IT UP - To engage in Tetris play.

Example:
Player One: "Shall we T it up?"
Player Two: "You're on."

BALLS TO THAT, YO - Common term during Tetris play, used by a player to show detest, disapproval, and/or angst toward the opponent's play.

Example:
Player One makes a Tetris.
Player One: "Suck it, bitch!"
Player Two: "Balls to that, yo!"

NOCTURNAL TETRACULATION - Dreaming of Tetris, resulting in a euphoric sensation similar to that of a tetrigasm.

TETRANXIETY - Stress caused by Tetris. This is sometimes a result of insufficient performance in Tetris. Nocturnal Tetranxiety is very common. There have been cases in which individuals have had trouble sleeping due to this phenomenon.

FIENDING - Simply an irresistable urge to play Tetris.

FIENDING FOR THE START - The sudden Game Pause that occurs when a player has hit start believing he or she is the first player. In many official Tetris derivatives, a two player Tetris battle will only start when Player One has hit the Start button. If both players press Start, and Player Two's has registered second, the game will Pause and Player Two has "Fiended for the Start."

PENIS ENVY - The yearning for a Cock Piece when a Rectum is exposed. More specifically, penis envy occurs when one yearns for a Cock Piece and his or her opponent is visited by one or more of the illustrious Cock Pieces. This form of penis envy is even more stressful when the opponent does not even need the Cock Piece.

TETRONI - A player who is not very adept at playing Tetris; an easy win.

Source: The Tetris Taxonomy

The Pieces

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THE COCK PIECE

As is quite apparent for anyone who has seen a game of Tetris being played, or even participated in a competition themselves, Tetris obviously contains sexual undertones. The most prominent is the coveted phallic block, known officially as the "I-Piece." This block plays a crucial role, in that it is the main requirement for the act of a Tetris, or four simultaneous lines. The Cock Piece is the main source of most players' misery -- and joy.

THE MIDDLE FINGER PIECE

Ah, the Middle Finger Piece. Unique, as it is the only block, with appendages, that is symmetrical. The greatest number of lines you can deplete with this piece, unfortunately, is only two; however, the Middle Finger Piece is the only block that can be used for Rotating the Tires (see the Catalog of Tetramoves).

THE ASS BLOCK

Officially, this block is called the "O Piece." Oh, confound that Ass Block. It is a great source of misery. If there is no flat space for the Ass Block to rest, this is a great inconvenience. We suggest always keeping space around for the Ass Block, in case it decides to visit you. Also, you can keep rotating the Ass Block, but to no avail! It don't do shit, as the Ass Block is radially symmetrical.

THE "L" PIECE

Most players ask us, "Why do you call that one the L Piece?" Because it looks like a fucking L.

THE REVERSE "L"

Officially, this is known as the "J Piece," and like its twisted cousin, the L Piece, it can be used for a maximum of three depleted lines. Both the L and the Reverse L can be used for the Slide Under (see the Catalog of Tetramoves).

THE "Z" PIECE

The Z and S Pieces are somewhat of an oddity in the realm of the Tetris blocks. Both of these pieces have only two available positions; rotating them clockwise or counter-clockwise will end with the exact same result. A total of two depleted lines is maximum with either.

THE "S" PIECE

The sideways younger brother to the Z Piece; it's regarded as a black sheep, and everywhere Z Piece goes, it is embarrassed by S Piece.

Alexey Pajitnov

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Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov (Алексей Леонидович Пажитнов, regularly Aleksei Leonidovich Pazhitnov, born 1955) is a computer engineer from Russia now living in the United States, who developed the popular game Tetris while working for the Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a Soviet government-founded R&D centre.

Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris with the help of Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov in 1985. The game, first available in the Soviet Union, appeared in the West in 1986. Pajitnov also created the lesser known sequel to Tetris, entitled Welltris, which has the same principle but in a three dimensional environment where you see the "board" from above. The Soviet bureaucracy licensed and managed Tetris, and advertised it with the slogan "From Russia with Love" (on NES: "From Russia With Fun!"). Because he was employed by the Soviet government, Pajitnov did not receive royalties. Pajitnov, together with Vladimir Pokhilko, moved to the United States in 1991 and founded the Tetris Company with Henk Rogers.

He helped design the puzzles in the Super NES versions of Yoshi's Cookie and designed the game Pandora's Box, which incorporates more traditional jigsaw-style puzzles.

He began working for Microsoft in October 1996. Pajitnov worked for the Microsoft Entertainment Pack: The Puzzle Collection, MSN Mind Aerobics and MSN Games groups. Pajitnov's new, enhanced version of Hexic, Hexic HD, was included with every new Xbox 360 Premium package. He left Microsoft in 2005.

On August 18, 2005 WildSnake Software announced Pajitnov will be collaborating with them to release a new line of puzzle games.

Source: Wikipedia

Juegos

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Mini Tetris

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Cotse Tetris

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Smiech's Tetris

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Interview: Tetris - The Making of an Icon

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We interview two game prodigies, Alexey Pajitnov & Henk Rogers, whose fasninating story behind Tetris goes right to the top of NCL - with plenty of twists along the way.

By Hasan Ali Almaci

Alexey Pajitnov gets a lot more attention these days but he's still not as well known as his most famous creation. In the mid 1980s Pajitnov, while working in a computer research lab in communist Russia, designed a devilishly addictive puzzle game that would soon inundate the industry.

Originally, the game only worked on the antiquated computer it was developed on, but as soon as it started spreading across the campus, Pajitnov knew that Tetris was something special.

The intervening decades have been good to Tetris - if not, for the most part, Pajitnov himself. It's one of the most recognizable games ever created, but few are aware of its bedraggled past, a story of lawyers and licensing that spans years and continents.

To find out more about how Tetris came to be and what it meant to its creator, we went straight to Pajitnov, to hear in his own words what creating a
video game icon was like.

We also spoke to Henk Rogers, an entrepeneur often said to be close to Nintendo 'Godfather' Hiroshi Yamauchi, whose name is unfamiliar to most Tetris players but without whose help they'd never even have heard of the game.

What follows is their story, as both Pajitnov and Rogers talk to Kikizo in these exclusive interviews.

Alexey Pajitnov Interview

Kikizo: You grew up in Moscow, right?

Pajitnov: Yes, yes. It's my motherland you have to understand, I like it here.

Kikizo: Well, could you tell us a little bit more about that? About what you did and the schools you went to, the education you got before everything started, mid-'80s

Pajitnov: Well, there's nothing special about my life. I was just a normal Moscow schoolboy. And then I graduated high school and went to a local institute. It's like a university - it was a technical university. It is called Moscow Institute of Aviation, I graduated from it in 1979 and started working for the Moscow Academy of Sciences, in the computer centre. I worked in computer science research, writing some programs for the computers there. All my life, I liked to play games, and I started programming games. At one point, working at my computer, I wrote the code for a game called Tetris. That's the true story.

Kikizo: Did you write anything else before that? Any other games?

Pajitnov: Well, yes. I wrote several games, several
puzzles, and Tetris was just one of them. The other puzzles weren't very interesting. I published some later.

Kikizo: Were you pretty much free to do what you wanted in your research, or were you really restricted?

Pajitnov: Basically, I had my own working plan, and I had some work to do. All the games and puzzles were done in spare time. I had enough freedom, actually, because basically we spent very long hours in our job places, and we were able to do all our work. And we had extra time to use the computers.

Kikizo: The computers, what kind of computers were those?

Pajitnov: At that time I worked with lots of different computers from different countries, with different processors. I did work in the lab, which was full of all kinds of different stuff, and there I wrote whole programs for different kinds of hardware. In particular we did work with our first personal computer. That was still the era of mainframe computers. Big stuff on the whole. But at some point we got the very first load of personal computers, which stayed on my desk. I was very excited about that.

Kikizo: And Tetris was made on an Elektronika 60 computer?

Pajitnov: Yes, that's what I'm talking about. It was small. It was a type of desktop computer. Well, basically, it had 64KB memory, and [laughs] it had just an alphanumeric screen, so it was kind of strange.

Kikizo: Did you have access to Western computers like the ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64? Those were things that were up-and-coming in the US and Europe back then. Or an MSX?

Pajitnov: Well, we had the MSX a bit later, maybe four or five years after that. At that time we had some of the very first PCs in the computer center. We had several business-type PCs. I think they were Japanese PCs. But I did follow them. Me personally, I didn't have them. So I worked with the other hardware.

Kikizo: Did you have access to the work being done in the West, or were you mostly shielded from that?

Pajitnov: I saw the computers, and most of the games I saw on PCs were - well, at that time it wasn't very big. But I saw Pac-Man, I saw Q-bert and a few other games like that.

Kikizo: It's funny you should mention Pac-Man because from what I understand the creator of Pac-Man [Toru Iwatani] was in the same situation you were. He was being paid a salary, he made a game that was really, really big all over the world, and he didn't even get a bonus for it.

Pajitnov: I think that was the typical situation. Pac-Man was a great game. I think it was quite a big achievement. Actually, I had a friend with Pac-Man, and he was playing it over and over again and he started writing his own version. I didn't understand why he was doing that at all so I asked him and he said: "When I play this game, I feel like some sort of alien intellect plays this game with me. I can't believe that this is all random so I wanted to write it myself to understand how it works." [Laughs]

Kikizo: That's a great story! So then Tetris came along. It took a few years before it became really big; for the first few years it just spread throughout Moscow, to other communist countries, and then it spread to the West. Did you have any knowledge of the way it was growing?

Pajitnov: Not exactly, because the way the software was distributed was just the coding and copying. You'd write a program for a friend, and within a couple days you'd see it everywhere. So basically, there was no way to track it. That was the way things happened back then, but I can probably say it spread much quicker than two years. As soon as I finished it my first version was on the Elektronika 60. It was just a Russian computer. And when I released that version, meaning when I gave the code to my friends, in a few weeks I saw it in every place that had a Elektronika 60. And then I realized that the game was not bad and people found it interesting. So I converted it for PC, in 1985, so we could make it look pretty. And afterwards we decided to go ahead and put the PC version out there and it spread out really quickly. It was a question of just a couple of months.

Kikizo: But it did take a couple of years for a deal to be made to get it distributed in the West.

Pajitnov: Yes, all the licensing was another story. That was a long time ago.

Kikizo: Well, the licensing was an entirely different story, apparently, because there were a lot of troubles, with a lot of companies thinking they had the license. Were you aware of what was going on there? Were you involved?

Pajitnov: Yeah I was involved. They kept me involved with that. It was lots of trouble. But lots of words have been written about the licensing troubles and everything that went wrong there and I don't really like to talk about that because when I think about those things I lose my sense of humour.

Kikizo: OK. We'll stop that part there, then. You did keep one great friend through it, right? Henk Rogers.

Pajitnov: Exactly, yes. He came to Moscow in 1988, I believe, looking for the rights for handhelds, for Game Boy. He honestly thought he had the rest of the rights for it, for Japan at least. He published games for Japanese computers, and he did publish them for Nintendo, on the Famicom, which was kind of disputable license wise.

Kikizo: Because there was Tengen as well.

Pajitnov: Yeah, Tengen thought they had the rights as well because it was supposedly sub-licensed to them. Henk published his version in Japan. But that deal was a different story license wise as well. But he came to Moscow just to buy the handheld rights.

Kikizo: And, of course, it proved to be a really, really great synergy for Nintendo and Tetris.

Pajitnov: Yeah, Tetris was a pretty liked game because of the Game Boy. Those two were kind of born for each other.

Kikizo: Yeah, that's what I was thinking as well. The Game Boy would have never been that popular without Tetris, and Tetris would have never been that popular without.

Pajitnov: Yes, that is absolutely true. It's like they were made for each other.

Kikizo: So that's a three-way relationship that still exists today. Nintendo, you and Henk.

Pajitnov: Yes, we still try to keep together.

Kikizo: What is your involvement these days with the Tetris Company? Henk is the president of the company, right?

Pajitnov: Yeah, I'm one of the founders of the Tetris Company and I am an adviser. We have the quality control meetings for the games. I do not work on the games directly but because we want to keep the game pure we have these meetings to discuss the upcoming Tetris games. We don't want to give it too much diversity, because we want to keep the title straight, you know? So we look at the new versions and give the approval and try to keep the standards all Tetris games have to keep.

Kikizo: Did your life change in any big way after '88, when you were still in Russia?

Pajitnov: Oh yes, of course. First of all, I decided I wanted to be a game designer, and so I became a game designer. Eventually I quit my job at the computer centre and became a freelance in Moscow and designed games for different companies. Later on I moved to the United States, in '91, and founded a new company called AnimaTek and tried to keep it and published several games there. Later on, I joined Microsoft in '96, and I did work for seven years at Microsoft as a game designer, and I published several games there. And now I'm freelance again. That's my story.

Kikizo: Could we talk a little bit about AnimaTek?

Pajitnov: At AnimaTek we developed a kind of interesting software called El-Fish. It wasn't a pure game, but it was kind of very strange software, in between everything. It was partially a game, partially a sort of scientific system for artificial selection. Partly it was kind of a 3D screen saver. So it was quite a bit of everything. And it wasn't very successful, because it kind of appeals to human creativity, but there aren't too many creative people around, you know? It was a little bit early for its time because it needed a higher-end PC. And creatively there wasn't really anything on the market like it at the time.

Kikizo: I'm wondering, do you know Yoot Saito?

Pajitnov: Yoot Saito? Who's that? A designer?

Kikizo: Yeah, a Japanese game designer. Apparently El-Fish was one of his influences in designing Seaman for the Sega Dreamcast.

Pajitnov: I see. Well, El-Fish was done very well - at least it was an experiment many appreciated very much. Later on we did another game called Ice and Fire that failed. It was a 3D shooter, and everyone forgot about it. Me personally, I didn't like this game but still, it was a part of our history. And later on AnimaTek started working more on technology and made several graphical software systems. But I wasn't very interested in working with technology alone. I just wanted to make games. So I left the company and went to Microsoft.

Kikizo: What year was that?

Pajitnov: '95 or '96 I joined Microsoft.

Kikizo: So, while you were working at Microsoft, you still had a game for the N64?

Pajitnov: Ah, yes, we did Tetrisphere, but that was a kind of contract work, and I kind of continued at my master job. That's why I kept looking around and I could do contract work.

Kikizo: So Microsoft had no problem with you working for Nintendo?

Pajitnov: I think Microsoft hired me after I was done with that Nintendo work. It was just contract work though. It wasn't that they prohibited me from doing work for others.

Kikizo: So from Microsoft then you worked on Night Moves, Clockworks, Microsoft Entertainment Pack...

Pajitnov: ...No, no. Clockworks and Breakthru - those games were not my games. I didn't make those but they were brought to the market by Spectrum Holobyte. They wanted my name on there saying Alexey Pajitnov Presents. Night Moves however was my game. I designed it and Spectrum Holobyte published it. I think this was in '92 or '93. Then I started working on Microsoft Puzzle Collection. Not all the games on there were mine but four of them were. Then I did a game called Mind Aerobics. After that I made a game called Pandora's Box. Later on I got involved in several projects at Microsoft, as a simple level design or whatever. But later on I joined the Arcade (Online games) team, which was a large unit that did several games for them, including Hexic.
Kikizo: Talking about Hexic brings me to an observation of mine. A lot of people don't know you've done work on all these games. A lot of people play Hexic HD on the 360 and they have no idea it's one of your games.

Pajitnov: I'm not very good at marketing, but this was Microsoft's decision, not mine.

Kikizo: So it's not like it's a conscious decision of yours to keep your name off the product?

Pajitnov: Oh, no, it just happened. I created everything, it's there, they just didn't use my name for advertisement, that's it. I don't know for what reason because for Pandora's Box they did it and for Hexic they didn't. I didn't mind it either way. They pay my salary you know.

Kikizo: I was wondering about it because in the past we have seen that they put your name on the box to push a title and we see examples these days where they slap the name of a designer on the box of a freeware PC game conversion so they can sell it by associating said designer with a game he had little do with, like Every Extend Extra on PSP, for instance, where the game gets sold on Tetsuya Mizuguchi's star power.

Pajitnov: [Laughs] Well Spectrum Holobyte tried to do something like that with me, like I mentioned a bit before. That is what publishers sometimes do and it is all part of the marketing. Like I said, I don't mind if the games I get attached to are really good games and I don't get involved into what marketing does. I like to make games so that is what I do and they do their job. Sometimes that doesn't work out the way you want but I am not a specialist in marketing so I don't get involved in that. Whatever marketing asks, I do. If they want my name on the box, sure, if they don't want it on there, I don't mind.

Kikizo: You won the GDC game design challenge this year. Will you be competing again next year?

Pajitnov: That left me a little bit confused. They called me and asked me to compete at the challenge and I didn't understand completely. I wasn't aware I would be competing against other people so that's why my presentation was so poor.

Kikizo: But you did win.

Pajitnov: Yes, but the other guys, they had made these great and funny presentations. I liked the one by Harvey Smith especially. He had a great and well thought out story line. It is too bad nothing will be done with it though. This is a big problem with American industry. They have these great ideas and creativity but they never pursue it and it stays in the conceptual phase.

Kikizo: Going back to Russia, there has been a huge shift in the social structures in Russia and life has changed dramatically for everyone. So what time in Russia do you feel was the best for you?

Pajitnov: Well, I don't know. I like Moscow. I like the city. Love walking around and doing stuff here with friends and relatives. And then I head back to the United States to work.

Kikizo: Do you still see most of your friends from back when you made Tetris?

Pajitnov: Well some of my old friends and colleagues, yes, but there are a few I have lost track of because they have passed away, moved out of the country or other things like that. I have lots of other friends too who stayed here and had nothing to do with Tetris or my work, childhood friends, school friends, etc. People who I try to stay in touch with and who I love visiting when I am here in Moscow.

Kikizo: And in Hawaii there is Henk Rogers. How often do you visit him?

Pajitnov: I visit him several times a year. We are good friends and we discuss our work as well as what we would like to do and ask each other's advice. He has a very interesting project right now for instance and I am wondering if I should get involved in it or not, because while the project is very interesting it is not my genre and not the sort of thing I usually do.

Kikizo: Can you tell us a bit more about that project he is working on?

Pajitnov: Its sort of like Second Life but on Mars. There are a lot of things that can be improved with Second Life and he wants to make something like that but done right. Maybe I could get involved making game activities to use in that virtual world, but I really don't know yet.

Kikizo: After you left Microsoft there was an announcement by Wild Snake Software that you would start working with them on some projects. What is the status on those?

Pajitnov: Ah, yes, those are business friends of mine. They live near Saint Petersburg and they formed this company, and I formed a partnership with them a while ago. They were one of the developers of Microsoft Puzzle Collection, and since then they formed Wild Snake and we have worked together. They are a bunch of creative guys and I love to work together with them. They are a pretty small company but hopefully you will enjoy the games we are working on.

Kikizo: Are there any particular game designers that you admire?

Pajitnov: Oh, yeah. I really like Will Wright. I love his games. Actually he is a good friend of mine and every time we meet we talk a lot about games. I really like Sid Meier and have spent a lot of time playing his games on my PC, and I love the games by Shigeru Miyamoto. I like tactical stuff a lot.

Kikizo: Can you tell us a bit more about your current projects?

Pajitnov: I have a couple of projects with my friends at Wild Snake. I plan on refreshing one of my old games and I am working on another Microsoft project, but its still too early to talk about those because they are still in the early stages.

Kikizo: OK, why not work on the game you won the GDC game design challenge with?

Pajitnov: [Laughs] I have no intention to do that myself but if somebody called me and said, "Alexey I will program that game for you, I will make it for you," sure. [Laughs] But I don't think anyone will do that, sadly.

Kikizo: So what games do you play in your spare time and which ones do you enjoy the most?

Pajitnov: I don't have a constant preference so I usually play two or three different puzzle games and recently I have been playing a bit of World of Warcraft.

Kikizo: Oh, what level are you on and with what character?

Pajitnov: I have several characters. As a game designer I am always interested in what makes something work in a game so I tried all kinds of characters. My favourites are hunters. I have a few hunters. I have a mage. Haven't done too much on the Horde side.

Kikizo: Isn't it dangerous for a designer to play World of Warcraft because, lets face it, it kills off productivity.

Pajitnov: Well I didn't spend that much time in it and I know how to handle addiction. A big part of its appeal is the interaction with other people so I am interested in how they tune the game with the different characters and I played the game to see how that worked. They did a pretty good job there. I am not saying it's perfect or excellent but it works.

Kikizo: What inspires you to make games?

Pajitnov: Some things just come to me and with most of the games it's the influence of other games. Maybe that sounds very boring but that's how it usually goes. Sometimes the inspiration is positive and sometimes it is negative. An example would be Hexic, for instance. That was inspired by Bejeweled - in a negative way. I was playing Bejeweled and it frustrated me, I felt that the game wasn't designed properly so I tried to make the game the way it was supposed to be.

Kikizo: Did you feel that Bejeweled 2 was a better game then?

Pajitnov: Yes, definitely. Bejeweled 2 was a much better game. It corrected the faults of the first one and was much more fun to play.

Kikizo: What puzzle games at other companies have caught your attention lately?

Pajitnov: Well I haven't played too many puzzle games recently. I saw a few interesting games on DS recently but I didn't purchase a DS yet.

Kikizo: Didn't Nintendo give you one?

Pajitnov: No.

Kikizo: Why not? They should. It's got a Tetris game after all.

Pajitnov: I didn't ask for one. But its pretty cheap. maybe I should buy one when I am back in Seattle. I just didn't have time, I guess, with all the travel recently.

Kikizo: That's what I do when I have a long distance flight though - bring my DS along and play some Tetris on the flight.

Pajitnov: Oh, no. I try to rest. I sleep when I fly.

Kikizo: Did you ever imagine Tetris would become as big as it did?

Pajitnov: Well I realized early on that it was a good game but of course no one could have predicted that it would become that big.

Kikizo: What are your impressions about today's consoles (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii)?

Pajitnov: I really hated consoles. From the very beginning I was a PC person. And now I love the consoles and I believe that they are the driving force now. I believe that the introduction of game-tailored controllers will become really big. Those are things I am looking forward to.

Kikizo: Do you mean specialty controllers like the Wii has?

Pajitnov: Yes, but much more than that. Special controllers tailored to specific games.

Kikizo: What's your opinion on the consoles themselves?

Pajitnov: I worked on the 360 and my next game is for the 360 as well. It is a really nice platform. I like the PS3 as a platform as well, even though I don't own one yet. And I am looking forward to the Wii. I don't have it yet either but I really want one so I will buy one once they are readily available.

Kikizo: What are your thoughts on the DS and the PSP?

Pajitnov: Well, I am mostly outside of the handheld business. I am more of a PC and console person, but I did try them and the PSP has several good puzzle games but they didn't inspire me enough to purchase one yet. And the DS I will probably get soon.

Kikizo: Your games focus on pure playability rather than flashy effects, bombastic sound and high end graphics.

Pajitnov: Yes but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate games that excel in those areas. I like my games to be good, of course, but as a designer that is what I can do so I try to do my best on my strengths rather then try something which I know other people can do better then me. Maybe other people can take my games and make them look really pretty. [Laughs]

Kikizo: Speaking of that, a lot of people have complained about seeing Tetris in their dreams, or closing their eyes and seeing the blocks, or walking around and starting to think about lining up the blocks to clear lines, etc. How do you feel about getting into people's heads like that?

Pajitnov: [Laughs] Yes, if you play something for a long time that is what happens to you. I don't think it's something inside the games. I had it with World of Warcraft as well where I saw battles play out, so it's nothing special about Tetris I think. It can happen with all games.

Kikizo: In 1990 I couldn't get the Tetris Game Boy music out of my head. I could hear it playing in my head at the least expected times.

Pajitnov: [Laughs] Yeah, sometimes music can have that effect too.

Kikizo: And do you have a final message for the readers?

Pajitnov: No, I never have messages, sorry. I don't want to act like I know more than other people and teach them and lead them and tell them what they should do. Come on.

Kikizo: Well that is a great final message.

Pajitnov: Just play the games and enjoy yourself.

Henk Rogers Interview

Kikizo: You were born in Holland right? Are you still Dutch?

Henk Rogers: Yes, I still have Dutch citizenship but since last year I have dual citizenship - I finally got US citizenship last year.

Kikizo: Why did you wait so long to get US citizenship?

Rogers: A variety of reasons really. I lived in Japan for quite a while, and there is a lot that can be improved with the US policy right now, so I finally decided to become American and be part of making the changes the country must go through.

Kikizo: Can you tell us a little bit more about your family background?

Rogers: Well, both of my natural parents were Dutch Indonesian and my stepfather is American. Thats how I got the name Rogers and ended up in New York, at the age of 11.

Kikizo: Did you stay in touch with the country you were born in?

Rogers: Yes of course, it's been a while now so I need to get back as soon as possible.

Kikizo: Why is that?

Rogers: I love Dutch Licorice, I need to go back to stock up on that stuff.

Kikizo: [Laughs] So you moved to the US and that's where your love for videogames started?

Rogers: Exactly. At college we had one of those early big mainframe computers. You know, those things with huge tapes and stuff on. I was fascinated with them and started to play computer games and tried writing them myself. This was before games became commercial programs and computers only really existed at universities and banks.

Kikizo: After graduating you decided to move to Japan. Why did you decide to do that?

Rogers: [Laughs] Well, during my studies there was this Japanese girl I really liked and when she went back to Japan I chased after her and ended up staying in Japan for like 18 years.

Kikizo: The old boy-meets-girl-and-chases-her-around-the-world story, then. [Laughs] How good are your Japanese skills?

Rogers: I can speak it quite well but I refuse to learn kanji.

Kikizo: Any particular reason for that?

Rogers: The way I see it is that everything can be done with a Roman alphabet and Arabic numerals. Kanji on the other hand forces you to memorize thousands of symbols, and when you do that with a growing kid it stifles creativity because the brain gets trained to memorize rather then be creative with a smaller subset of symbols. It limits the creativity by forcing you into memorizing rather than creating so I always refused to learn it out of principle. I feel it's counterproductive and stifles creativity.

Kikizo: And in Japan you started your own videogame company right?

Rogers: Yes I started Bullet Proof Software, and we actually produced the very first Japanese RPG.

Kikizo: When did you leave BPS, and why?

Rogers: I left BPS in 1995 and moved to San Francisco because there was this unstoppable thing coming up called the Internet, and I wanted to be part of that emerging, growing industry. I saw its potential and wanted to become part of its growth and Japan back then was the wrong place to be to take advantage of that growing market.

Kikizo: Why was that?

Rogers: Mostly because in those days in Japan NTT (Nippon Telephone and Telegraph) had a telecommunications monopoly and because the Internet in Japan used to be prohibitively expensive; the Internet access prices were insanely inflated, so I went to the Bay Area where everything was happening.

Kikizo: That makes sense. Let's talk about Tetris a bit then.

Rogers: OK.

Kikizo: The stories about Hiroshi Yamauchi's shark-like business practices are the stuff legends are made of, so how did you as a foreigner convince someone who was so feared in the industry to license Tetris from you?

Rogers: That wasn't entirely my achievement. I made my pitch to Mr Yamauchi and he decided to ask Shigeru Miyamoto about it. So he calls Miyamoto into the room and asks him about this Tetris game and Miyamoto tells him that a lot of the people at Nintendo are playing the game during their lunch breaks or even when they should be working. At that point I think Mr Yamauchi realized the potential of the game.

Kikizo: So what do you think about Yamauchi and the reputation he has?

Rogers: I have great respect for him as a businessman and we get along great. It's been a few years now but we used to play Go - it's a Japanese game of strategy and many old-school Japanese business people think it sharpens your business skills.

Kikizo: We heard that you get along with Mr Yamauchi much better than his own daughter and son-in-law, Minoru Arakawa [former president of Nintendo of America], do.

Rogers: Where do you hear such things?

Kikizo: As a member of the press we sometimes hear things we shouldn't from drunk company representatives at press events and parties.

Rogers: [Laughs] OK. Well, yeah, you would have to ask the Arakawas about that.

Kikizo: Before you convinced Mr Yamauchi, though, you had to convince Arakawa for the Tetris deal, right?

Rogers: Sort of. I actually did the Tetris on Game Boy deal with Mr Arakawa. We didn't have a final deal and instead I had talked with him about licensing Tetris for handhelds, and he gave me his word that he would do the Tetris deal through me.

Kikizo: So you went to Russia to try to get a license for the handheld rights of the game even though you didn't have a final deal yourself?

Rogers: Yeah, you could say that.

Kikizo: And then you had to fight off Mirrorsoft, which was part of the late Robert Maxwell's media empire?

Rogers: Actually Mirrorsoft was in the hands of Robert's son, Kevin Maxwell. I don't think he got involved in it too much himself and as it turned out Mirrorsoft had been sub-licensing the Tetris license unjustly to several other companies, so we used that as leverage. There also was a lot of pressure on ELORG [Elektronorgtechnica, former Soviet Ministry of Software and Hardware Export] to give full licensing rights of the game to Mirrorsoft but Perestroika and Glasnost had started to get a hold of old Soviet Russia so we managed to get the license after all. And after that Arakawa had to decide on the Game Boy pack-in game between Tetris and Mario. He obviously made the right choice. [laughs] And the rest is history.

Kikizo: What was the story with Tengen Tetris then?

Rogers: Ah yes, that is an interesting story as well. One month after I got the handheld rights to Tetris, I was back in Moscow to lock up the console rights for Nintendo. Atari Games (Tengen's parent company) had sub-licensed questionable rights to Tetris from Mirrorsoft and Nintendo argued that the license was invalid and Nintendo could prove it because Nintendo had the worldwide console rights at that point. This however was part of a larger battle for Nintendo because Tengen was going to produce games for the NES. By showing that Tengen didn't own a valid license for Tetris and infringed directly upon Nintendo's licenses, Nintendo was able to force them to stop selling the game and give them a big blow.

Kikizo: And that's what put Tengen on the path to destruction right?

Rogers: No, not really, because Tengen a few years later actually became an official Nintendo licensee, so their demise wasn't Nintendo's fault.

Kikizo: And during the early '90s then you brought the creator of Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov, and his friend Vladimir Pokhilko to the US?

Rogers: Yes, after the fall of the Iron Curtain that became a lot easier and I felt I owed them because Tetris was making my company a lot of money.

Kikizo: They started a company called AnimaTek. Were you involved with that?

Rogers: I wanted to help them out because I had made all that money with Tetris and Alexey wasn't getting anything from the game he created because it was all in the hands of ELORG, at the Russian Ministry of Software. So I said to Alexey, "Let me give you money. Tell me how much you need and you can have it."

Kikizo: So how much did he ask?

Rogers: None. He kept saying, "No, no. If you give me money I will go to jail." Coming fresh from Russia he really thought that taking money just like that would be akin to theft and he could go to jail for it.

Kikizo: Then what happened?

Rogers: Well, I asked them if they had a dream they would love to see fulfilled and if I could help make that dream a reality, and they told me about a project they had been dreaming of, so I became a financial backer for them so they could chase that dream and make it a reality. That project was called El-Fish. It was sort of an interactive fish tank that played onscreen when the computer was idle.

Kikizo: What happened when the rights for Tetris reverted back to its original creator?

Rogers: Well, when that was about to happen Alexey came to me and said the rights to the game were supposed to revert to him, but the Russian Ministry of Software would contest it because they argued that the games rights under Soviet Russia were property of the government and Alexey had no rights on the game.

Kikizo: How did that get solved?

Rogers: I talked with the Russians and basically made a deal that would be beneficial to all.

Kikizo: Can you give details?

Rogers: Basically I argued that nobody wins in a protracted lawsuit. I told them that such proceedings could take years and would be bad for everyone because during that time nobody would be making any money off Tetris. I suggested we start a separate company dealing with all things Tetris and we would be equal partners in that. That convinced them and we went ahead.

Kikizo: And that company is The Tetris Company?

Rogers: Yeah. We started it in '96 and have been taking care of all the Tetris licenses and deals with that. We set out the rules of the game the licensees have to keep in order to keep the game Tetris, etc.

Kikizo: And then you started a cellphone games company?

Rogers: That was in 2001. I did that for about four years until I sold it along with the cellphone Tetris rights to a company called Jamdat [itself bought by Electronic Arts not much later].

Kikizo: And what have you been up to since then?

Rogers: Officially I am retired. In my case however retirement means I still head Blue Planet Software, working three days a week. And I started three new companies.

Kikizo: Three new companies? Can you tell us a bit more about them?

Rogers: Sure thing. First we have Tetris Online which we hope to launch soon. That one I actually started with Minoru Arakawa, the ex-president of Nintendo of America, who we talked about earlier. We are good friends and he lives here in Hawaii as well. Currently the plan is to launch it in the US and Japan first.

Kikizo: It's good to see you get along with Arakawa as well as Yamauchi. And the second company?

Rogers: The second company I started is called Blue Lava Technologies. it's the name of my old cellphone games company that I sold to Jamdat. I got the rights to the name back so I used that. It's a company for picture management software. I have so many pictures that managing them became a big problem, so I hired someone to classify all my pictures and make databases based on years, or who is in the pictures, etc. It made me think, though, because if i have this problem surely a lot of people have the same problem; people who don't have the means to hire someone to do that for them. So we started the company to make software that automates that process and allows the user to show the pictures on almost anything that has a screen. We hope to finish and release the software by the end of the year.

Kikizo: And the last company?

Rogers: The last company is called Avatar Reality. I assume you are familiar with Second Life.

Kikizo: Yeah, I think it is horrible.

Rogers: Exactly. Game-elements-wise and graphically speaking it really can be improved. That is because in its inception not that many people from the games industry were involved. What we want to do is make a virtual world on Mars but designed from the ground up to take advantage of the latest technologies and with the involvement of game designers so the world has a lot more to do in it than in Second Life. A place that is fun to be in and always has something for the user to do.

Kikizo: Final question, the girl you chased to Japan, did you get her?

Rogers: [Laughs] Yeah I did, her name is Akemi. We got married and have four children.

Kikizo: That's a great way to end this interview, thank you very much for your time.

GAME OVER TETRIS

2008-11-24T08:41:00.001-08:00

TETRIS is the 4th video performance of the GAME OVER Project. This stop-motion video was shot and played during the Urbaines Festival (www.urbaines.ch) at the Palais de Rumine (Lausanne, Switzerland) on November 24th 2007.

DIRECTOR
Guillaume Reymond

The Tetris saga

2008-11-24T08:12:00.000-08:00

Tetris is one of the few games that achieves ultimate popularity. It is remarkably simple, yet remarkably difficult. It's been ported to every computer and game console known to man, and has sold millions of cartridges, tapes, and disks across the land.

Besides that, it also led to one of the most interesting legal battles in the history of video games, leading to the famed Tengen version of Tetris and to the downfall of a few companies. It's a pretty cool story, so let's get down to business. Hold on for a second while I set the time machine to cruise control..

June 1985
Inspired by a pentominoes game he had bought earlier, Alexey Pazhitnov creates Tetris on an Electronica 60 at the Moscow Academy of Science's Computer Center. It is ported to the IBM PC by Vadim Gerasimov and starts spreading around Moscow. Pazhitnov gets a small degree of fame for his program.

July 1986
The PC version makes its way to Budapest, Hungary, where it is ported to the Apple II and Commodore 64 by Hungarian programmers. These versions catch the eye of Robert Stein, president of the British software house Andromeda. He plans to get the rights to the PC version from Pazhitnov directly, and to get the other versions from the Hungarian programmers. Even before Stein gets in touch with Pazhitnov or the Academy, he sells all the rights to Tetris (except for arcade and handheld versions) to Mirrorsoft UK and its USA affiliate, Spectrum Holobyte, owned by Robert Maxwell's Pergamon Foundation.

November 1986
Stein wires a contract for the rights to Tetris to the Academy. Although Pazhitnov would later say that he did not mean to give a firm go-ahead to the deal, Stein goes ahead and flies to Moscow to sign the contract. He returns empty-handed; the Russians made up for their lack of knowledge of the video game world with obstinance. Stein makes a plan to essentially steal Tetris, to claim it was invented by the Hungarian programmers.

Meanwhile, the IBM PC version of Tetris is released by Spectrum Holobyte and Mirrorsoft, causing an instant sensation not only as an obscenely addictive game, but also as "the first game from behind the iron curtain". The game is filled with graphics of Russian themes (battles, Matthias Rust landing his Cessna on Red Square, Yuri Gagarin's first space mission). Stein still does not legally own any rights to Tetris.

June 1987
Stein presses for and finally gets a license giving him the rights to make Tetris for the IBM PC and compatibles "and any other computer system". Now he owns the copyrights to Tetris, but he still doesn't have a contract with the Russians.

January 1988
Tetris is released for all home computers. It gets glowing reviews and sells quickly in computer stores. Stein's plan to "steal" the rights to Tetris is foiled when the CBS Evening News interviews Pazhitnov as the inventor of the game. A new company, ELORG (Electronorgtechinca), takes over the negotiations with Stein.

ELORG's director, Alexander Alexinko, realizes that Stein is giving out rights he doesn't have and threatens to cut off any deal. Stein, in turn, threatens to start an international situation.

May 1988
After months of bickering, Stein signs a contract with ELORG to make Tetris for computers. The contract expressly forbids rights to arcade and handheld versions, and any other mediums "which we did not dream about yet". Meanwhile, Tetris has become the top-selling computer game in England and the United States.

July 1988
Stein meets with Alexinko in Paris to work out arcade rights to Tetris. Alexinko has quite a different agenda; he hasn't seen any money from Stein at all yet. Meanwhile, Spectrum and Mirrorsoft are sub-licensing their rights. Spectrum gives Bullet-Proof Software the rights to make Tetris video and computer games in Japan; at the same time, Mirrorsoft gives Atari Games the exact same rights in Japan and North America. The two companies start infighting.

Robert Maxwell, owner of both Mirrorsoft and Spectrum, sides with Mirrorsoft on the matter. Atari starts plans to release an arcade and NES game (under the Tengen label). Bullet-Proof Software still has the computer rights in Japan; BPS president Henk Rogers successfully gets the rights to release a video-game version later in the year. Tetris is released for the Famicom in early November 1988; eventually, two million cartridges would be sold.

November 1988
The Game Boy is undergoing development. Nintendo of America head Minoru Arakawa wants to make Tetris the pack-in game; he enlists Henk Rogers to get the handheld rights to Tetris for him. Rogers contacts Stein but basically gets stonewalled by him, so Rogers decides to fly to Moscow to get the rights himself. Stein, sensing why Rogers asked for the rights, flies to Moscow as well. Robert Maxwell's son, Kevin, also decides to fly to Moscow to straighten out what is by now a large-scale licensing mess. The three men fly into Moscow at the exact same time.

February 21, 1989
Rogers gets to ELORG representative Evgeni Belikov first. He impresses Alexey Pazhitnov and the Russians, and signs a contract for the handheld rights to Tetris. Afterward, Rogers shows off the Famicom version of Tetris to the Russians. Belikov is shocked. He didn't give Rogers the rights to make a console version! Rogers explains that he got the rights from Tengen; Belikov has never heard of Tengen! Rogers, trying to appease the Russians, tells Belikov the part of the story Stein did not tell him, and writes him a check for royalties on the Tetris cartridges he has already sold, with promises of more checks. He sees that he has a chance to get all the console rights to Tetris, but knows that the much larger Atari will fight him. Fortunately, he has Nintendo on his side!

A reminder: Robert Stein's original agreement was only for computer versions of Tetris. Any other rights he gave out weren't his to sell.

Later, Stein makes it to ELORG. Belikov makes him sign an alteration to the original contract defining computers as "PC computers which consist of a processor, monitor, disk drive(s), keyboard and operation system". Stein misses this line defining computers; he later realizes that it was all a big orchestration on Rogers' part to get his rights from Stein. The next day, he is told that, although he can't get the handheld rights at the moment, he can get the arcade-game rights. He signs the contract for them three days later.

February 22, 1989
Kevin Maxwell visits ELORG. Belikov takes out Rogers' Famicom Tetris cart and asks him about it. Maxwell was unaware that his own company gave some rights to Atari Games until he reads Mirrorsoft's name on the cartridge. Maxwell asserts that the cart is a pirated copy, and returns to his agenda of getting the arcade and handheld Tetris rights. He leaves with only the right to bid on any rights remaining on Tetris.

The final scorecard: Kevin Maxwell walks off with a piece of paper, Robert Stein with the arcade rights, and ELORG with conclusive evidence, thanks to Maxwell's assertion that any Famicom carts are pirates, that it never sold the video game rights. If Maxwell wanted those rights it would have to outbid Nintendo. Henk Rogers has the handheld rights and tells Arakawa at NOA that the console rights are up for grabs. BPS makes a deal to let Nintendo make Tetris for Game Boy; a deal that was ultimately worth between $5 and 10 million to BPS.

March 15, 1989
Henk Rogers returns to Moscow and makes a gigantic offer for the console rights to Tetris on behalf of Nintendo - an offer that, although undisclosed, was high enough that Mirrorsoft did not try to match it. Arakawa and NOA chief executive officer Howard Lincoln fly to the USSR.

March 22, 1989
A contract for the home videogame rights is finalized with Nintendo, which insists on a clause that the Russians would come to America to testify in the legal battle that would undoubtedly ensue after word of the contract comes out. The advance cash for ELORG is reported to be around $3 to 5 million. Belikov wires Mirrorsoft saying that neither it, Andromeda, or Tengen were authorized to distribute Tetris on video game systems, and that those rights are now given to Nintendo. The Nintendo and BPS executives have a party that night in their Moscow hotel room.

March 31, 1989
Howard Lincoln gleefully faxes Atari Games a cease-and-desist order to stop manufacturing any version of Tetris for the NES. Both Atari and Robert Maxwell become furious. Tengen responds to Nintendo on April 7th that they completely own the rights to home versions of Tetris.

April 13, 1989
Tengen files an application for a copyright of the "audiovisual work, the underlying computer code and the soundtrack" of Tetris for the NES. The application does not mention Alexey Pazhitnov or Nintendo's rights to the game.

Robert Maxwell, meanwhile, is using his vast media empire to try to get Tetris back. He contacts both the Soviet and British governments to intervene on the Tetris matter. Infighting between the Communist party and ELORG begins, and Maxwell gets a promise from no less than Mikhail Gorbachev that he "should no longer worry about the Japanese company".

In late April, Lincoln flies back to Moscow and learns of ELORG's being put upon by the government. In the middle of the night, he receives a call from NOA that Tengen has sued Nintendo.

The next day, he starts interviewing Belikov, Pazhitnov, and many others at ELORG, to make sure that Nintendo's case for the Tetris home rights is airtight. NOA immediately countersues Tengen, and evidence begins to be gathered.

May 17, 1989
Tengen releases their version of Tetris with a full-page ad in USA Today, despite the coming legal battle.

June 1989
The court case between Tengen and Nintendo begins.

The battle mostly hinged on one matter: Was the Nintendo Entertainment System a computer, under the definition in the contract that Belikov made Stein sign, or a video-game system? Atari argued that the NES was meant to be a computer, due to its expansion port and the existence of a computer network for the Famicom (short for "Family Computer") in Japan. Nintendo's argument was more to the point: the Russians at ELORG had never had the intention of selling the video game rights to Tetris; the definition of "computer" in Stein's contract proved it.

June 15, 1989
A hearing is held about the injunctions Tengen and Nintendo had given each other to cease manufacture and sale of their respective versions of Tetris. Judge Fern Smith decides that neither Mirrorsoft nor Spectrum Holobyte had been granted the video game rights, so therefore it could not have legally given those rights to Tengen. Nintendo's injunction request is granted.

June 21, 1989
Tengen's version of Tetris is taken off the shelves, and manufacture of the Tengen version is ceased. Several hundred thousand copies of Tengen Tetris, sitting in their boxes, lie in a warehouse.

July 1989
Nintendo's version of Tetris for the NES is released. About three million are sold in the US. At the same time, the Game Boy, with Tetris as the pack-in, is being sold. America gets Tetrisized.

This ends the main history of Tetris; the lawsuit between Nintendo and Atari would continue to drag on and on and on (it was finally finished up by 1993).

Epilogue

Atari Games still released an arcade version of Tetris, selling about twenty thousand units. Atari Games was recently bought up by Williams/WMS; the fate of the Tengen Tetris carts lying in warehouses is unknown. In all likelihood they were bulldozed since Tengen could not legally get rid of them any other way. If the figures are to be believed, there are about one hundred thousand Tengen Tetris cartridges floating around; a less-than-average run by NES standards, but still nowhere near an impossible cart to find.

Robert Stein made, in total, about $250,000 on Tetris. He could have made a great deal more, of course, but Stein had trouble getting Atari and Mirrorsoft to pay him royalties for the (bogus) rights he sold them. Spectrum Holobyte had to organize another deal with ELORG just to hold on to the computer rights to Tetris.

Robert Maxwell's large-scale media organization collapsed in the midst of the struggle, and Robert Maxwell himself died suspiciously as questions rose about whether he was entirely honest about his business dealings. As a result, Mirrorsoft UK faded away as well.

The big winners of the whole affair were Henk Rogers, president of BPS, and Nintendo themselves. How much did Tetris make for Nintendo? That's difficult to answer, considering that Tetris being the pack-in for the Game Boy enticed customers to buy the Game Boy.. and from there, buy other Game Boy carts. Bringing all this into account, the figure can go up and up and up. About 30 million Game Boy Tetris carts have been made.

As for the Russians, no one made big money from Tetris except for the Soviet government. As the USSR broke up, the people at ELORG and the Academy scattered across the country.

Alexey Pazhitnov made nearly no money from Tetris itself. ELORG made, then cancelled a deal that would have given him merchandising rights to Tetris. Still, Pazhitnov was happy that the game he created became famous world-wide, and he did get an 286-clone from the Academy as a reward; he also had a much nicer apartment than most of his colleagues. In 1996, with the financial backing of Henk Rogers, he organized The Tetris Company LLC, and is now finally getting royalties for his creation.

Source: www.atarihq.com

Tetris Returns

2008-11-23T13:03:00.000-08:00

| PLAY |

Tetris

2008-11-23T13:02:00.000-08:00

| PLAY |

Tetris 7

2008-11-23T13:01:00.000-08:00

| PLAY |

Easy Tetris

2008-11-23T13:00:00.000-08:00

| PLAY |

StateTris

2008-11-23T12:58:00.000-08:00

| PLAY |

StackUP

2008-11-23T12:57:00.000-08:00

| PLAY |

SNTris

2008-11-23T12:55:00.000-08:00

| PLAY |

Perspectivce Tetris

2008-11-23T12:52:00.000-08:00

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Fruit Drop

2008-11-23T12:51:00.000-08:00

| PLAY |

Cherry Bomb

2008-11-23T12:50:00.000-08:00

| PLAY |

Bombaz

2008-11-23T12:48:00.000-08:00

| PLAY |

3D Tetris

2008-11-23T12:44:00.000-08:00

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BlockZ!

2008-11-23T05:07:00.000-08:00

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Tetris Attack

2008-11-22T09:28:00.000-08:00

Tetris Attack is a puzzle video game developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System home video game console and Game Boy handheld game console. It is part of the Puzzle League series and is a direct port of the Japanese game Panel de Pon for the Super Famicom with significant rebranding. A Japanese version of this rebranded title, Yoshi no Panepon (ヨッシーのパネポン?), was released in Japan for the Satellaview satellite modem service.

Tetris Attack uses characters and settings from Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, and despite its use of the Tetris name, the game bears almost no resemblance to the Russian puzzle classic.

System: Super NES, Game Boy

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TetriNET

2008-11-22T09:15:00.000-08:00

TetriNET is a multiplayer online Tetris game for up to six people, developed by St0rmCat in 1997 that supports team play. The last official version is 1.13. St0rmCat later released TetriNET 2, which features improved graphics, more types of special blocks, additional features (such as hold piece and block shadows), and a master server. TetriNET plays like standard multiplayer Tetris but with a twist: clearing rows will cause special blocks to appear in the player's field. If a line containing a special block is cleared, then that special block is added to the player's inventory. Clearing multiple lines at once increases the number of special blocks received.

System: Windows (Blocktrix), Linux

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Blockout

2008-11-22T09:06:00.000-08:00

Blockout is a puzzle videogame, created in 1989 by Polish developer - California Dreams, designed by Aleksander Ustaszewski and Mirosław Zabłocki.

The game is the logical extension of Tetris into the third dimension. In Tetris, the player manipulates a set of tetrominoes which fall into a two-dimensional pit (seen from the side). The aim is to solve a real-time packing problem by forming complete rows, which then disappear and score points. Poor play leads to incomplete rows, caused by inefficient arrangements of tiles; these rows do not disappear, giving the player progressively less space and less time to play subsequent pieces. Similarly, in Blockout, the player manipulates a set of polycubes which fall into a three-dimensional pit (seen from above; the pieces appear in the foreground and fall away). The pieces can be rotated around all three axes, and moved horizontally and vertically. The aim is to form complete layers.

System: Windows,

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Netris

2008-11-21T15:57:00.000-08:00

Netris is a free, open source, Tetris™ clone written in C#. It can be played in single-player, but it is much better as a multiplayer game. The objective in multiplayer is to outlast your opponent.

System: Windows, Linux

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S-Tris 2

2008-11-21T15:40:00.000-08:00

S-Tris 2 is based on the famous Tetris concept and is the follow-up of our popular S-Tris game. This game comes as a demonstration of our in-house developed game engine Edge and is completely free.

System: Windows, Windows Mobile, Symbian

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Screens:

Gravytris

2008-11-21T15:23:00.000-08:00

Gravytris is a unique combination of Tetris and Columns with realistic gravity effects. The simple principle of tile stacking in tetris to delete full rows is combined with the fast paced color matching in Columns. In Gravytris you may delete lines or colors in the same game. Another unique feature is the realistic calculation of gravity. All blocks fall until they reach the bottom or a supporting stone. If you play other tetris games, you will sometimes notice free blocks "hanging in the sky", if a deleted line splits a tile. This no longer happens in Gravytris and makes the gameplay more surprising.

System: Windows

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Screens:

Quadra

2008-11-21T14:52:00.000-08:00

Quadra is an addictive puzzle game and competitive, action-packed multiplayer game all-in-one. It features incredibly smooth gameplay, recursive line clearing allowing blocks to combine in violent chain reactions, block shadow to help you drop blocks with precision 10 levels with colorful background images and matching sound effects, integrated CD music player, worldwide highscore table with recordings of your best performances, fully configurable multiplayer mode with team play, keep an eye on your opponents with the remote watch windows, chat window, powerful and flexible user interface TCP/IP support for internet or LAN multiplayer games and more.

System: Windows, Linux

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Screens:

Crack Attack!

2008-11-21T10:15:00.000-08:00

Crack Attack! is a free OpenGL game created by Daniel Nelson based on Tetris Attack for the Super Nintendo. It is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X licensed under the GNU General Public License. The Mac OS X version of the game was ported by Jeff Disher, but another port of the game for Mac was done by Daniel Aarno, who has named his version Mac Crack Attack!. Aarno's Mac Crack Attack! includes features such as sound and full screen mode, while Disher's port does not. It is included in all major Linux distributions.

Since version 1.1.10, the project has been adopted by Andrew Sayman, who has released the latest version of the game (1.1.14) for Linux and Windows. The latest version includes sound by Miguel Ángel Vilela, extremely low graphics mode, VS computer modes and other various bug fixes.

The name was chosen to indicate the game's addictive nature, referring to the drug crack cocaine. This is borne out by the experience of users.

System: Linux, Windows, Mac OS X

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Screens:

Blocks 3D

2008-11-21T09:49:00.000-08:00

Blocks 3D is a Tetris clone that uses the same principles as the original, but takes them to the 3rd dimension.
Blocks 3D is an open source Tetris clone that brings the classic back to your PC in an even more complex and exciting version. Not only can blocks be arranged left, right and vertically, but in horizontal fields. It's controlled with the Q, W, E, A, S, D keys, and there are three difficulty levels.
The game uses Crystal Space and is thus hardware accelerated using OpenGL.

System: Windows

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Screens:

Stacker Blocks 3D

2008-11-21T09:42:00.000-08:00

Stacker Blocks 3D is a falling blocks game in the style of classic Tetris. However, unlike classic Tetris, Stacker Blocks uses Direct3D graphics to give the game added visual appeal. This game is completely free and is even OPEN SOURCE - you can download the source code and see how it all works!

System: Windows

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Screens:

Tetris Queen

2008-11-21T09:02:00.000-08:00

Tetris Queen is a new versions of Tetris, one of the most popular and entertaining games ever invented in the history of video entertainment.

Since the origins of the video game we have experienced a truly large variety of games from different genres. Each of us has our favourite game, but it’s no coincidence that 25 years later players still choose “Tetris” as their friendly program. What is the reason? The answer is actually quite straightforward, simple graphics and truly addictive playability.

The objective of Tetris Queen is similar to previous versions. You need to align the different pieces so that they form complete horizontal lines, eliminating them from the game setting and adding up the most points possible in order to complete the levels.

System: Linux, Windows, Dos

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Screens:

KSirtet

2008-11-21T08:45:00.000-08:00

KSirtet is an adaptation of the well known game Tetris.

You must fit the falling pieces to form full lines. You can rotate and translate the falling piece. The game ends when no more piece can fall ie when your incomplete lines reach the top of the board.

Current features: multiplayers and AI player, animations and tile size are configurable, Transparent background, World-wide highscores!

System: Linux

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Screens:

Cultris

2008-11-21T08:15:00.000-08:00

Cultris is yet another Tetris®-clone. But an extremly fast-paced one. You can play games over LAN/Internet with up to nine other players. There's also a single-player mode for training purposes. The game features up to date 2D graphics and decent music. But Cultris still feels like the original. Just a bit faster... A tiny bit faster...

System: Windows

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Screens:

Tetris Story

2008-11-21T04:41:00.000-08:00

by Vadim Gerasimov

Tetris is a popular game developed in 1985-86 by Alexey Pajitnov (Pazhitnov), Dmitry Pavlovsky, and me. Pajitnov and Pavlovsky were computer engineers at the Computer Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences. I was a 16-year-old high school student. My computer science teacher Arkady Borkovsky brought me to the Computer Center where I worked and played with IBM PCs. I quickly learned programming and enjoyed working on various fun computer projects.

Dmitry noticed me when I was writing a directory encryption program for MS DOS. He told me that he liked computer games and had designed a few games for a mainframe computer. He asked me if I was interested in helping him to convert the games to the PC and to work together on new game ideas. I was obviously very interested. Pavlovsky showed me his games and gave me the source code of one of them. On the next day I made a PC version of his game. We started working together.

Very soon Dmitry introduced me to his friend Alexey Pajitnov who was also interested in making computer games. Dmitry told me that Alexey had even managed to sell some of his psychology-related games. Alexey showed us a couple of games he developed earlier. We decided to work as a team. My roles were a PC expert, programmer, and graphics designer.

Our plan was to make about a dozen addictive computer games for the PC and put them together in one system we called a computer funfair. Pajitnov and Pavlovsky also thought about selling the games. The selling part seemed unusual and difficult because we lived in the Soviet Union. Making and selling something privately was highly irregular. We focused on making development tools for the PC, converting earlier games to the PC, and developing new game ideas.

In a few weeks we had converted most of the worthy older games and developed a good set of libraries to support graphics (4-color 320x200), text, and sound in our games. We gathered quite often to discuss new ideas, and to code the games. In a few months we had a nice set of games. Most of those games are probably lost. I recently found only one of them. The game was a remake of Xonix with an inverted hidden play field. Dmitry named it Antix (short for Antixonix). Warning: the game does not have a proper timer delay and runs too fast on modern computers unless you use some emulation software. I do not know who developed the original Xonix. But the game was a smashing success at the Computer Center and elsewhere around Moscow before Tetris spread around.

A few months after we started working together, Pajitnov came up with the Tetris idea. Before we met he had a computer game called Genetic Engineering. In that game the player had to move the 4-square pieces (tetramino) around the screen using cursor keys. The player could assemble various shapes. I don't remember the exact objective of that game, but it seemed rather dull.

At one of our meetings Pajitnov told Pavlovsky and me about his new idea of tetramino falling into a rectangular glass and piling up at the bottom. He believed the game might be successful. Shortly after discussing the idea Pajitnov made a prototype for Electronica 60, then I ported it to the PC using our development system. Pajitnov and I kept adding features to the program for a couple of years.

The game name "Tetris" was purely Alexey's idea. The word is a combination of "tetramino" and "tennis". I thought it sounded a bit strange in Russian, but Pajitnov insisted on giving the game this name.

A couple of years later Pajitnov and I also developed a 2-player version of Tetris and worked on a couple of psychological test projects for Alexey's friend Vladimir Pokhilko. Vladimir was the first clinical psychologist who conducted experiments with Tetris. In the 2-player Tetris the glass had no bottom. The pieces for the first player move from the top, for the second - from the bottom. Two players competed for the space inside.

Pajitnov's efforts to sell the games together failed. We decided to give our friends free copies of the games including Tetris. The games quickly spread around. When the freely distributed PC version of Tetris got outside of the Soviet Union and a foreign company expressed an interest in licensing Tetris, Pajitnov decided to abandon all the games but Tetris. The decision made Pavlovsky very unhappy and destroyed our team.

In 1991 Pajitnov moved to the USA with his friend Vladimir Pokhilko. Pavlovsky immigrated to UK in 1990.

Tetris has generated a lot of revenue for sometimes unexpected organizations and people and caused a few nasty legal clashes. You can read about the business side of the story in the book Game Over by David Sheff. An interesting BBC documentary filmed in 2003-2004 portrays some of the events and presents views of a few key people involved in the business turmoil.

Alexey Pajitnov and an American entrepreneur Henk Rogers founded the Tetris Company. I have nothing to do with the company, and do not support its policy. Contrary to the claim attributed to Henk Rogers there were no "straightforward business arrangement" between Pajitnov and myself. In the Soviet Union, where private business was outlawed and the concept of intellectual property was not defined, people could not make private business arrangements of this kind. The Computer Center of Academy of Sciences owned everything we made. Several years later the situation in the Soviet Union changed, but this was a different story. When I worked on Tetris, even a government organization could not formally hire me because I was underage. I worked on Tetris just for fun. I don't remember Pajitnov ever paying me for anything related to Tetris either. Pajitnov started fixing the business aspects of the situation a few years later when he and Henk Rogers participated in negotiations with Elorg (the only government organization in the USSR that could sell software abroad). Pajitnov stopped by my home and asked me to urgently sign a paper "to get lots of money for us from game companies". He didn't leave me a copy of the paper. As far as I remember the paper was saying that I agree to only claim porting Tetris to the PC, agree to give Pajitnov the right to handle all business arrangements, and refuse any rewards related to Tetris. I did not entirely agree with the content, but I trusted Alexey and signed the paper anyway. In a few months my name disappeared from all newly released versions of Tetris and all Tetris-related documents. Alexey registered a US copyright (R/N PA-412-170) referencing the free PC version of Tetris (original version 3.12) we developed together.

The first MS DOS version of Tetris

by Vadim Gerasimov

Tetris effect

2008-11-21T04:37:00.000-08:00

The Tetris effect is the ability of an activity to which people devote sufficient time and attention to begin overshadow their thoughts, mental images, and dreams. It is named after the video game Tetris. In the game a player rotates and moves different falling tetrominoes, or shapes made up of four square blocks. If the player can arrange the shapes so there are complete horizontal lines of blocks without any gaps, those lines are eliminated. The object of the game is to eliminate as many lines as possible before the shapes fill the screen.

People who play Tetris for a long time might then find themselves thinking about ways different shapes in the real world can fit together, such as the boxes on a supermarket shelf or the buildings on a street. In this sense, the Tetris effect is a form of habit.

They might also see images of falling Tetris shapes at the edges of their visual fields or when they close their eyes. In this sense, the Tetris effect is a form of hallucination.

They might also dream about falling Tetris shapes when drifting off to sleep. In this sense, the Tetris effect is a form of hypnagogic imagery.

Other examples

The Tetris effect can occur with other video games, with any prolonged visual task (such as classifying cells on microscope slides, weeding, picking fruit, assembling burgers, or even playing chess), and in other sensory modalities. For example, there is the tendency for a catchy tune to play out unbidden in one's mind (an "earworm"). In kinesthesis, a person newly on land after spending long periods at sea may move with an unbidden rocking motion, having become accustomed to the ship making such movements (known as sea legs or mal de debarquement). Computer programmers and developers sometimes have similar experiences, and report dreaming about code when they sleep at night, and return to work the next day feeling like they had never left.

Place in memory

Stickgold et al. (2000) have proposed that Tetris imagery is a separate form of memory, likely related to procedural memory. This is from their research in which they showed that people with anterograde amnesia, unable to form new declarative memories, reported dreaming of falling shapes after playing Tetris during the day, despite not being able to remember playing the game at all.

History of the term

According to Earling (1996), one of the first references to the term is by Garth Kidd in February, 1996. Kidd described "after-images of the game for up to days afterwards" and "a tendency to identify everything in the world as being made of four squares and attempt to determine 'where it fits in'". Kidd attributed the origin of the term to computer-game players from Adelaide, Australia.

In popular culture

The Tetris effect appears in some works of literature, although not so named. For example, Ian McEwan, in the novel Atonement (2001) described an example of a Tetris hallucination: He had been walking these roads, he thought, all his life. When he closed his eyes he saw moving asphalt and his boots swinging in and out of view. (p. 260)

The Tetris effect appears in several examples of popular culture. For example, the ability of Tetris to dominate one's thoughts was parodied in the cartoon The Simpsons. In the episode "Strong Arms of the Ma", Homer Simpson uses his Tetris skills to fit several hundred dollars worth of garage sale items in his sedan. The comic Perry Bible Fellowship made light of the Tetris effect in the strip entitled "Game Boy". The ability of Tetris to dominate one's dreams appeared in a cartoon on a t-shirt in 2007 and in cartoons in 2005 and in 2007.

Source: Wikipedia

Awards

2008-11-21T04:36:00.001-08:00

The long history of Tetris resulted in Guinness World Record awarding the franchise 9 world records in the Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition. These records include, "Most Ported Video Game", "Game With the Most Official and Unofficial Variants", and "Longest Prison Sentence for Playing a Video Game", which is held by Faiz Chopdat, who was jailed for four months for playing Tetris on his cell phone while on a flight to Manchester, England. He refused to stop playing after being repeatedly warned by the cabin staff.

Source: Wikipedia

Popular culture

2008-11-21T04:33:00.000-08:00

Tetris' popularity has resulted in its appearance in the media. It was featured in two episodes of the video-game oriented cartoon Captain N: The Game Master. It was also referenced in the Muppet Babies episode "It's Only Pretendo", The Simpsons episode "Strong Arms of the Ma" as well as "Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo", Family Guy episode "Prick Up Your Ears", and Futurama episode "Fear of a Bot Planet." Commercials also occasionally parody the game. Police Academy: Mission to Moscow alluded to Tetris by depicting the Russians trying to hypnotize Americans through a puzzle video game referred to as "The Game" in the movie. Even other videogames have shown tributes to Tetris such as the character Ai from NeoGeo Battle Colosseum, who can summon and attack characters with various Tetris blocks.

In 2007, the video game website GameFAQs hosted its 6th annual "Character Battle", in which the users nominate their favorite video game characters for a popularity contest in which characters participate. The L-shaped Tetris piece (or "L-Block" as it was called) entered the contest as a joke character, but on November 4, 2007, it won the contest.

In Japan, a hugely popular live-action game show called Brain Wall ran for a number of seasons. Contestants would be assigned to teams (Red or Blue) and paired with recurring characters. Each team would then, in turn, face a wall of painted styrofoam with a Tetris-like shape carved out. The wall would advance on the contestant, who must pass through the opening by posing, squeezing or jumping. Later levels have a pool of water at the end of the run (the effect being to force the contestant into the pool if they fail.) The recurring characters provide running commentary, built-in rivalry and comic relief. Clips from the series are available on the Internet, under the show's English nickname "human Tetris". A variant of this game show was ported to Argentina as well, called "El muro infernal" ("The infernal wall" in Spanish).

In Thomas Pynchon's 2006 novel, Against the Day, mention is made of a "Captain Igor Padzhitnoff" (presumably pronounced the same as Pajitnov) whose preferred method of causing trouble was "to arrange for bricks and masonry, always in the four-block fragments which had become his 'signature,' to fall on and damage targets designated by his superiors".

Source: Wikipedia

End of play

2008-11-21T04:28:00.000-08:00

Players may lose a game of Tetris for the following reasons:
They can no longer keep up with the increasing speed, or
A specific implementation of the game without very responsive control and without lock delay fails to keep up with itself when the pieces' downward velocity is much more than the maximum lateral velocity the player can apply to a tetromino. In other words, the possibilities for tetrominoes' movement are limited to the shape of a triangle in the playfield on faster levels. Once the triangle no longer covers the entire bottom rows of the playfield, as in level 29 of the NES version, this ceases to be the game's inherent challenge and becomes what some players call a design flaw.

The question Would it be possible to play forever? was first encountered in a thesis by John Brzustowski in 1988 and has been more recently investigated in published articles by Walter Kosters. The conclusion reached was that a player is inevitably doomed to lose. The reason has to do with the S and Z tetrominoes. If a player receives a large sequence of S tetrominoes, the naïve gravity used by the standard game eventually forces the player to leave a hole in a corner.

Suppose that player then receives a large sequence of Z tetrominoes. Eventually, that player will be forced to leave a hole in the opposite corner without clearing the previous hole. Back and forth, the holes will necessarily stack to the top. If the pieces are distributed randomly, this sequence will eventually occur. Thus, if a game with an ideal, uniform, uncorrelated random number generator is played long enough, any player will top out.

Practically, this does not occur in most of Tetris variants. Some variants allow the player to choose to play with only S and Z tetrominoes, and a good player may survive well over 150 consecutive tetrominoes this way. On an implementation with an ideal uniform randomizer, the probability at any given time of the next 150 tetrominoes being only S and Z is one in (2/7)150 (approximately 2×10-82). The expected wait until such a sequence occurs has an order of magnitude close to the number of atoms in the known universe. Most implementations use a pseudorandom number generator to generate the sequence of tetrominoes, and such an S–Z sequence is almost certainly not contained in the sequence produced by the 32-bit linear congruential generator in many implementations (which has roughly 4.2 × 109 states). In fact, newer Tetris brand games from 2001 and later tend to follow a new guideline such that the randomizer generates all seven tetrominoes in a permutation at one time, guaranteeing an even distribution over the short term,[citation needed] and this randomizer allows the player to continue a game indefinitely in theory, often clearing all blocks from the playfield.[citation needed] On the other hand, the "evil" algorithm in Bastet often starts a game with a series of more than seven Z pieces.

On the Game Boy version of Tetris the player can only get as much as 999999 score, though the game will continue playing.

Recent versions of Tetris such as Tetris Worlds allow the player to continuously rotate a block once it hits the bottom of the playfield, without it locking into place (see Easy spin dispute, above). This permits a player to play for an infinite amount of time, though not necessarily to land an infinite number of blocks.

Several of the subproblems of Tetris have been shown to be NP-complete.

Source: Wikipedia

Newest features

2008-11-21T04:26:00.000-08:00

Newer versions of Tetris add different scoring goals not present in traditional Tetris. As achieving these goals while not topping out becomes more difficult, these games usually add a few features to help the player.

The New Tetris and The Next Tetris are the first official Tetris games to feature multiple piece previews, showing 3 in advance. Tetris Worlds for PCs and game consoles add 5 more, while the GBA version retaines the 3 piece preview. Tetris DS uses the 6-piece preview.

The "phantom piece" (referred to in some versions, such as the Tetris Mania cell phone game, as the "ghost") is a feature that shows an obscuration in the shape of the current piece over where that piece would drop. The feature disposes with the old problem of misdrops and is relatively new.

Hold piece is an optional ability to reserve a piece for later use, allowing a player to either avoid undesirable pieces or save desirable ones, usually the I piece or a piece needed to complete another goal. Some clones featured it as a powerup that the player could earn and use once. A hold piece available to the player at all times was first featured in The New Tetris. Games that have hold piece generally activate it when the player presses both rotate buttons simultaneously or when the player presses a dedicated button, depending on the game. When hold piece is activated, it causes the falling piece to move to the top and trade places with the hold piece. However, the feature cannot be activated twice in a row; a piece released from the hold must be dropped into the well.

Initial rotation and Initial hold are features that make the game accept rotation/hold button inputs while the next piece is still in the preview area. With initial rotation, when the player holds down the rotation button after the previous piece has locked down but before the next piece comes into the well, the next piece will come into the well in an already rotated state. Initial hold works similarly, as the piece will be already swapped with the hold piece when it enters the well. Initial rotation and Initial hold first appeared in the Tetris: The Grand Master series.

Tetris DS features wireless on-line play through the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection system. This new version also takes advantage of the touch screen in the added "Touch Mode," which has no time limit. Instead, every block is already placed in a tall tower, and the player uses the stylus from the Nintendo DS to shift blocks left and right and, in earlier towers, rotate blocks. The goal is to clear enough lines so that a cage of balloons reaches the ground. (This mode is themed on the NES video game Balloon Fight, hence the cage of balloons.)

Tetris DS also introduces the Metroid-themed "Catch Mode." In this mode, the pieces still fall downward, but the stack is moved and rotated instead. As the falling pieces bump against the stack, they get clustered into it. To clear blocks, there must be a solid area of the stack that's 4x4 or larger. When this happens, the blocks glow and the music changes. After ten seconds or upon pressing the X button, these blocks disappear and shoot a laser beam in a plus-shape, the horizontal part equal to the number of rows cleared and the vertical equal to the columns. This laser beam will destroy falling blocks and Metroid enemies in its path. The parts of the stack not hit by the laser beam will be pulled in towards the center of the stack after the laser beam dies. If a piece falls below of the bottom screen, the stack hits a falling block while rotating, or the stack hits a Metroid, the stack loses Energy. The player loses if the stack runs out of Energy or if the stack becomes so large that it can no longer fit on the bottom screen.

The Tetris arcade game offered different "puzzles" for selected rounds. The first three rounds are played normally, with no obstacles. At the start of round 4, eight bricks are placed vertically along each side of the well. Round 5 begins with ten bricks scattered throughout the bottom five rows. Round 6 begins with twenty bricks arranged in a pyramid. In rounds 7 through 9, the well starts out empty but single bricks will appear at random on top of your puzzle each time a piece lands that does not clear any lines, potentially thwarting any advance planning you may have done. In rounds 10 through 12, incomplete "garbage" lines will randomly pop up underneath your puzzle, pushing the puzzle upward, when a piece lands without clearing any lines. Rounds 13 through 15 begin with more blocks arranged in predetermined patterns, and the cycle continues throughout the remaining rounds in the game in groups of three.

Source: Wikipedia

Variations

2008-11-21T04:23:00.000-08:00

Tetris has been subject to many changes throughout releases since the 1980s. It is difficult to place a standard on the game, as newer releases frequently progress it either to make the game better or to keep players interested. Newer Tetris games have made the trend of pace rather than endurance. Older releases such as Game Boy or NES Tetris offer records according to points. Since the meter for points is set to only a certain number of digits, these game's records can be "maxed out" by an experienced player. The next big Game Boy release after Tetris, Tetris DX, in marathon mode—comparable to mode A in previous releases—allowed an additional digit for the point meter. Even so, players still maxed it to 9,999,999 points after hours of play. For The New Tetris, world record competitors have spent over 12 hours playing the same game. It is probably for this reason of seemingly everlasting play that in both Tetris DX and The New Tetris, the new modes sprint and ultra were added. These modes require the player to act under a timer—either to gain the most lines or points in that time. Recent releases like Tetris Worlds did away completely with point records. This particular game kept records by how fast a certain number of lines could be cleared depending on the level. A drawback of this deviation, along with some other newer features, is that many traditional players rejected these advances all together. Critics of Tetris Worlds said it was broken due to how a piece is able to hover over the bottom for as long as a player needs;[18] although, players of the game generally do not mind this feature because exploiting it will only hinder play, which is unfavorable to making a record time. Tetris LLC has been juggling different features with different modes of play in past years trying to satisfy traditional and newer players alike.

There are many different modes of play added in recent years. Modes appearing in more than one major release include: classic marathon (game A), sprint (otherwise game B or 40 lines), ultra, square, and cascade.

The field dimension of Tetris is perhaps the least deviated among releases, with the exception of some releases on handheld platforms with small screens. (For example, the Tetris Jr. keychain has 8 columns and 12 rows.) It is almost always 10 blocks wide by 20 blocks high. However, the original Tetris for Game Boy is an exception with a 10 by 18 field of play. The field height may have been decreased to fit within the Game Boy screen. As a result, Tetris for Game Boy had an increased level of difficulty compared to some of its counterparts. Game Boy Tetris is also subject to faster speeds at lower levels.

Traditionally, blocks spawn within the four most central columns and the two highest rows. The I tetromino occupies columns 4, 5, 6, and 7, the O tetromino occupies columns 5 and 6, and the remaining 5 tetrominoes occupy columns 4, 5 and 6 (or in some especially older versions 5, 6, and 7). In some more recent games, pieces spawn above the visible playfield.

In traditional games, a level-up would occur once every ten lines are cleared. During a level-up, the blocks fall slightly faster, and typically more points are given. In some newer games such as Tetris Worlds, the number of lines required vary upon each new level. The fall speed also varies but is usually no more than 20 milliseconds faster for each step per level. For example, NES Tetris operates at 60 frames per second. At level 0, a piece falls one step every 48 frames, and at level 19, a piece falls one step every 2 frames. This means for each level, pieces fall 16 milliseconds faster per step. Level increments will either terminate at a certain point (Game Boy Tetris will top off at level 20) or will increase forever yet not increase in speed after a certain point. NES Tetris will level up in until the speed of level 29 (due to frame restrictions, pieces are not capable of dropping faster than this), but tool-assisted emulation will show that the level indicator will increase indefinitely-- eventually leading to a glitch where the meter displays non-numeric characters. Modern games such as Tetris the Grand Master or Tetris Worlds, at their highest levels, opt to drop a piece more than one row per frame. Pieces will appear to reach the bottom as soon as they spawn. As a result, a hover or slide feature is often implemented into these games to help deal with an otherwise unplayable fall speed. In some games, the hover time is regenerated after a piece is moved or rotated.

Soft drops were first implemented in Nintendo releases of Tetris so that pieces would be able to drop faster while not lock as to slide into gaps. The other option is hard dropping, which originated in early PC games such as Microsoft Tetris, a game developed by Dave Edson and bundled with Microsoft Entertainment Pack. With hard dropping, a piece falls and locks in one frame. Newer Tetris games feature both options. Some games have their locking roles reversed, with soft dropping making the pieces drop faster and locking down, and hard dropping making the pieces drop instantly but not lock.

Single direction rotation is an older restriction that has since been ruled out in nearly every new official release by the favor of separate buttons for clockwise and one for counter clockwise rotation. In traditional games, the unsymmetrical vertical orientation I-, Z-, and S-pieces will fill the same columns for each clockwise and counter clockwise rotation. Some games vary this by allowing two possible column orientations: one for counter clockwise and one for clockwise rotations. Double rotation, only seen in progressive clones such as Quadra and DTET, rotates the piece 180 degrees.

One of the features most appreciated by professional players, is the ability of rotating the pieces even if these touch the left or right walls. In the NES version, for example, if a Z piece is "vertically" aligned and falling touching the left wall, the player cannot rotate the piece, giving the "bad feeling" that the "rotate buttons" are locked. In this situation, the player has to move the piece one position to the right and then rotate it to make the piece "horizontally aligned", losing then a precious time. Proper implementations of this "rotating feature" appear typically, among other, in the Atari Tetris Arcade version (MAME: atetris)

Piece preview allows a look at the next spawn. This feature has been implemented since the earliest games, though in those early games, having the preview turned on made the score increase more slowly.

Source: Wikipedia

History

2008-11-21T04:07:00.000-08:00

Tetris has been embroiled in a large number of legal battles since its inception. In June 1985, Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris on an Elektronika 60 while working for the Soviet Academy of Sciences at their Computer Center in Moscow with Dmitry Pavlovsky, and Vadim Gerasimov ported it to the IBM PC. Gerasimov reports that Pajitnov chose the name "Tetris" as "a combination of 'tetramino' and 'tennis'.

From there, the PC game exploded into popularity, and began spreading all around Moscow. This version is available on Gerasimov's web site.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.

Meanwhile, before any legal rights were settled, the Spectrum HoloByte IBM PC version of Tetris was released in the United States in 1986. The game's popularity was tremendous, and many players were instantly hooked—it was a software blockbuster, with reviews such as in Computer Gaming World calling the game "deceptively simple and insidiously addictive".

The details of the licensing issues were uncertain by this point, but in 1987 Andromeda managed to obtain copyright licensing for the IBM PC version and any other home computer system.

For Amiga and Atari ST two different versions by Spectrum HoloByte and Mirrorsoft became available. The Mirrorsoft version did not feature any background graphics while the Holobyte version had a background picture related to Russian themes for each level. Games were sold as budget titles due to the game's simplicity. Spectrum's Apple II package actually contained three diskettes with three different versions of the game, for the Apple II+ and Apple IIe on separate DOS 3.3 and ProDOS 5-1/4" diskettes, and for the Apple IIgs on a 3-1/2" diskette, none of which were copy-protected: the included documentation specifically charged the purchaser on his or her honor to not give away or copy the extra diskettes!

By 1988, the Soviet government began to market the rights to Tetris through an organization called Elektronorgtechnica, or "Elorg" for short. Pajitnov had granted his rights to the Soviet Government, via the Computer Center he worked at for ten years. By this time Elorg had still seen no money from Andromeda, and yet Andromeda was licensing and sub-licensing rights that they themselves did not even have.

By 1989, half a dozen different companies claimed rights to create and distribute the Tetris software for home computers, game consoles, and handheld systems. Elorg, meanwhile, held that none of the companies were legally entitled to produce an arcade version, and signed those rights over to Atari Games, while it signed non-Japanese console and handheld rights over to Nintendo.

Tengen (the console software division of Atari Games), regardless, applied for copyright for their Tetris game for the Nintendo Entertainment System, loosely based on the arcade version, and proceeded to market and distribute it under the name TETЯIS: The Soviet Mind Game (with faux Cyrillic typography incorporating the Cyrillic letter Ya), disregarding Nintendo's license from Elorg.Nintendo contacted Atari Games claiming they had stolen rights to Tetris, whereupon Atari Games sued, believing they had the rights. After only four weeks on the shelf, the courts ruled that Nintendo had the rights to Tetris on home game systems, and Tengen's TETЯIS game was recalled, with an unknown number of copies sold.

Nintendo released their version of Tetris for both the Famicom and the Game Boy (the Game Boy version was developed by Bullet-Proof Software, Inc., who held the Japanese license, despite Nintendo's license to the game) and sold more than three million copies; some players considered Nintendo's NES version inferior because it lacked the side-by-side simultaneous play of Tengen's version, but Nintendo's Game Boy Tetris became arguably the most well-known version of Tetris. The lawsuits between Tengen and Nintendo over the Famicom/NES version carried on until 1993.

Sega also released a Tetris game for the Mega Drive, however the ensuing blitz of litigation ensured that it was hastily withdrawn - possibly before it even reached shop shelves. A handful of copies remain, which now change hands for as much as 800,000 yen ($6600) making it probably the most expensive Tetris game in the world.

Pajitnov himself made very little money from the deal even though Nintendo was able to profit from the game handsomely.

In 1996 when Russian restrictions expired, he and Henk Rogers formed The Tetris Company LLC and Blue Planet Software in an effort to get royalties from the Tetris brand, with good success on game consoles but very little on the PC front. The Tetris Company (TTC) managed to secure trademark registrations for the Tetris mark in several countries and has licensed the brand to a number of companies, but courts have not decided on the legality of tetromino games that do not use the Tetris name. Blue Planet was later purchased by JAMDAT Mobile, in turn purchased by Electronic Arts.

According to circulars available from the United States Library of Congress, a game cannot be copyrighted (only patented), which would invalidate much of TTC's copyright claim on the game, leaving the trademark on Tetris as TTC's most significant claim on any government-granted monopoly.

Some players prefer Tetris brand games; others prefer homemade tetromino games downloaded from the Internet, which are given names such as "N-Blox" or "Lockjaw" so as not to infringe trademarks. In late 1997 and in mid-2006, TTC's legal counsel sent cease and desist letters to web sites that misused the Tetris trademark to refer to homemade tetromino games.

Source: Wikipedia

Gameplay

2008-11-21T03:33:00.000-08:00

A pseudorandom sequence of tetrominoes (sometimes called "tetrads" in older versions) - shapes composed of four square blocks each - fall down the playing field. The object of the game is to manipulate these tetrominoes, by moving each one sideways and rotating it by 90 degree units, with the aim of creating a horizontal line of blocks without gaps. When such a line is created, it disappears, and any block above the deleted line will fall. As the game progresses, the tetrominoes fall faster, and the game ends when the stack of tetrominoes reaches the top of the playing field and no new tetrominoes are able to enter.

Tetris game manuals refer to the seven one-sided tetrominoes in Tetris as I, J, L, O, S, T, and Z - due to their resembling letters of the alphabet - but players sometimes use other names for the pieces, such as "stick" for I or "snake" for S. All are capable of single and double clears. I, J, and L are able to clear triples. Only the I tetromino has the capacity to clear four lines simultaneously, and this is referred to as a "tetris." (This may vary depending on the rotation and compensation rules of each specific Tetris implementation. For instance, in the Super Rotation System (see below) used in many recent implementations, certain rare situations allow T, S and Z to 'snap' into tight spots, clearing triples.)

Colors of tetrominoes

Pajitnov's original version for the Elektronika 60 computer used green brackets to represent blocks. Versions of Tetris on the original Game Boy and on most dedicated handheld games also use monochrome or grayscale graphics. But most popular versions use a separate color for each distinct shape. Prior to The Tetris Company's standardization in the early 2000s, those colors varied widely from implementation to implementation.

Scoring

The scoring formula for the majority of Tetris products is built on the idea that more difficult line clears should be awarded more points. For example, a single line clear in Tetris Zone is worth 100 points, while a back-to-back Tetris is worth 1,200.

Nearly all Tetris games allow the player to press a button to increase the speed of the current piece's descent, rather than waiting for it to fall. If the player can stop the increased speed before the piece reaches the floor by letting go of the button, this is a "soft drop"; otherwise, it is a "hard drop". (Some games allow only soft drop or only hard drop; others have separate buttons.) Many games award a number of points based on the height the piece fell before locking.

In many games, an animation will complement scoring. For example, in the NES Tetris, Game Boy Tetris, and Game Boy Color Tetris DX, finishing some modes with at least a given score or a given difficulty results in a cut scene. In some cases, this is a rocket lifting off from a launch pad, where higher scores produce a larger rocket. Other possible cut scenes show dancers and musicians.

Gravity

Traditional versions of Tetris move the stacks of blocks down by a distance exactly equal to the height of the cleared rows below them. Contrary to the laws of gravity, blocks may be left floating above gaps. Implementing "recursive gravity", a different algorithm that uses a flood fill to segment the playfield into connected regions and then makes each region fall individually, in parallel, until it touches the region at the bottom of the playfield. This opens up additional "chain-reaction" tactics involving blocks cascading to fill additional lines, which may be awarded as more valuable clears.

Easy spin dispute

Although not the first Tetris game to feature "easy spin" (see The Next Tetris), also called "infinite spin" by critics, Tetris Worlds was the first game to fall under major criticisms for it. Easy spin refers to the ability of a tetromino's lockdown time to regenerate after left or right movement or rotation, and this has been implemented into The Tetris Company's official guideline. This new type of play differs from traditional Tetris because it takes away the pressure of higher level speed. Some reviewers even went so far as to say that this mechanism broke the game. The goal in Tetris Worlds, however, has to do with completing a certain number of lines as fast as possible, so technically the ability to hold off a piece's placement will not make achieving that goal any faster. Later, Gamespot would receive "easy spin" more openly, saying "though the infinite spin issue honestly really affects only a few of the single-player gameplay modes in Tetris DS, because any competitive mode requires you to lay down pieces as quickly as humanly possible." In response to the issue, Henk Rogers stated in an interview that infinite spin was part of the guideline, giving a rationale:

So the problem is you get part way through the game, make one small mistake, 'Aw man, I blew it,' and restart. I think that's an annoying way to play the game. So we decided it's better to give them a way to recover from that small mistake, but you're losing time. So if you sat there and rotated for, I don't know, five seconds, you've just taken five seconds out of the game that you needed to score so many points. So you won't find in the top games any gratuitous spinning going on, it just doesn't happen. It helps the beginning player who's trying to figure out what to do. It's a useless feature (for competitive play); it only helps if you're taking the time to think. The better players don't take that much time to think, that's the difference.

Source: Wikipedia

Tetris

2008-11-21T03:27:00.000-08:00

Tetris (Russian: Тетрис) is a puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov in June 1985, while working for the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow. He derived its name from the Greek numerical prefix "tetra-", as all of the pieces contain four segments, and tennis, Pajitnov's favorite sport

The game (or one of its many variants) is available for nearly every video game console and computer operating system, as well as on devices such as graphing calculators, mobile phones, portable media players, PDAs and even as an Easter egg on non-media products like oscilloscopes. It has even been played on the sides of various buildings, with the record holder for the world's largest fully functional game of Tetris being an effort by Dutch students in 1995 that lit up all 15 floors of the Electrical Engineering department at Delft University of Technology.

While versions of Tetris were sold for a range of 1980s home computer platforms, it was the hugely successful handheld version for the Game Boy launched in 1989 that established the reputation of the game as one of the most popular ever. Electronic Gaming Monthly's 100th issue had Tetris in first place as "Greatest Game of All Time". In 2007, Tetris came in second place in IGN's "100 Greatest Video Games of All Time".