Slashdot Mirror
Seventeen Years of Tetris
thefalconer writes "It all happened 17 years ago on a whim and an addiction of sorts. Alexey Pazhitnov created the one game that has caused so many people around the world to just about go nuts trying to win a game that has the ability to slowly drive you to insanity one small misshappen block at a time. Since the creation of the original Tetris game on an Electronica 60, there have been dozens of different incarnations of Tetris that have dazzled the eyes, boggled the mind, frustrated the emotions, and fried more than their fair share of braincells. There is also a very interesting history of tetris online that details its evolution from innocent game to insane addiction. Plus it's one of those games that never grows old. :D"
Tetris and Doom.
People living in glass house . . should change in the basement. -- vm
17 years of Tetris, 17 years of those damn little Z shaped ones coming at the exact wrong time.
"Oh no, 3 horny women and only 2 condoms...Thank god I read slashdot"
Although its faded since I haven't played for a while, sometimes I find myself thinking about various shape combinations and how they fit together. It's rather scary that a game can do that to you.
I could never figure out how to place half of those damn peices... oh well
Play javascript tetris online here.
tetris is the perfect game for the palm IMHO. id go crazy without it.
tetris is boring
I know it's a very addictive game, but it's not the best one out there. There are older games that are more widely played. Chess for example. Of course, chess doesn't have all that electronic music.
Do do, do doo do do do da da, da Daa da da da do, dedeledelo dedeledelo, dedeledelooho!
It has been around MUCH longer than that. Just look! http://www.somethingawful.com/inserts/articlepics/ photoshop/classicart/protagonist_christris.jpg
...probably owes a lot to Tetris. When I worked at FuncoLand, Tetris was the most bought and sold game we had for that system. It just had this long-term appeal.
My step mom interrupted my games all the time. The only time she ever apologized for it was when I was playing Tetris. That was the only game she'd play on it, so we finally came to an understanding. Heh.
What's everyone best game? The scoring varies too much, so just give your number of lines and the platform. Mine is 411 on Tetris DX for Game Boy Color.
All the different shaped pieces come together to (hopefully) form perfect, straight, uniform lines. Individualism of each piece fades as it becomes part of the whole.
However, the longer it goes, the more pieces that come, and the faster they go. Pretty soon, the system begins the breakdown! Things are out of control, and lines stop forming, until you just can't continue any longer.
Game over.
Okay, admit it... who else but me bought a Gameboy just to play this game? When I remember the Tetris music, it's always the tinny version emitted from that single Gameboy speaker....
I remember first playing Tetris on the gameboy and man did that simplistic game suck a ton of time out of my life. It never got old and I every game just felt like a unique experience. I'm going have to dig out my ole 'boy and see if it still runs!
I would argue that the 'Tetris Attack' style of Tetris is the best puzzle game in the genre created to date.
The best implementations?
If you for any reason do not believe my claim that this is the best tetris-style game ever created, then you have not played an implementation of it. Period.
Prove me wrong. Click. Try it. It's that incredible.
... who haven't implemented Tetris at one stage or another.
...
I remember a first-year comp sci class where the final assignment was a curses one. Most people of course did the simple menuing apps, etc.
Two of us though, completely independently, decided to implement Tetris clones. It's remarkable how different the code was
my tetris anonymous group leader has said that i've made progress, but this reminisce of tetris on Slashdot isn't going to help...
slashdot
speaking of addictions...
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
atarihq.com classifies the article as a "Previous special feature". Oh, well.
Nice reading, though. I guess that makes up for it.
With profound apologies to whomsoever this sig originally belonged.
Seventeen years? Isn't that a totally arbitrary number? Maybe my story about 128 months of Linux will get posted.
.....I think everything is starting to fall into place. ;)
My mom, as with most people's mothers, does not play video games. However, back around 1992-4 after gameboy had hit it off my brother and I both owned one. I remember one day, a saturday afternoon, and my mom, who was the musical director at a local church, was scheduled to play the organ for a wedding that afternoon. She had just recently picked up on the 'tetris' fever, and come 1 hour before the wedding was to start she was still chugging away on one of our gameboys in our living room, despite my brother and I's efforts to remove her. It finally took a phone call from the bride's parents to drag her away from the evil that is Tetris.
I love video games, and I give my respect to those games out today which strain even the most expensive video games with their high-end graphics. But any game, even that as simple as Tetris, which can hold the interest and delay my mother from a wedding is something that I will always give tribute too.
I remember many years ago my parents and I got into an argument about my video game habits. They couldn't understand how I could play some game for hours at a time. One day I sat my mom down and showed her tetris on the NES. A month later we bought a second console, because my parents loved the game so much. It is still the only video game that my parents play.
peace.
alric.
There are lots of clones of break-out.
Anyway that would belong under the Apple section because it is totally Apple's history, even though it was made before Apple was formed.
... I feel obliged to mention the best form of Tetris, IMHO, Tetrinet/Fast. This is a multiplayer form of tetris with specials (Add lines to opponents, clear lines on yourself, etc) and Tetrifast (Changed exe), removes the line delay between drops. Truely an addictive game to play with friends. You can grab the stuff @ http://www.tetrinet.org
If I wasn't so lazy, I'd have a sig.
There was the infamous Nudetris I saw on all those BBS's back in the day. Man, who would have thought a bunch of L and Z-shaped breasts would be so popular... Oh wait.
Tetris has been around for so amazingly long, it's absolutely floors me that there are some version of tetris which are just terrible. The New Tetris, which I believe is available for just about every console and maybe even PC, is the worst Tetris clone I've ever seen.
It's a good idea to take concepts that worked in previous versions and dismiss (or modify) the concepts that didn't work... it's amazing that a dev team could screw up so badly.
Still, Tetris rules.
Without you, the world would have been stuck with its adiction to Pac-Man sequels and clones, at least until Solitaire got packaged with MS Windows...
(Speaking of which, can anyone give a good accounting for the history of MS Solitaire? I know xsol and other solitaire games came out way before, but wasn't this the first computer game put in the hands of so many people at once?)
Get off my launchpad!
See here and here among other places
Although the game is pretty simple, it is innovative, considering the crack-like nature of the game.
Are the KDE, Gnome, and Emacs versions in good standing with the Tetris Company?
Trolls throughout history:
Jonathan Swift
It always bothers me when people say games like Puyo Puyo, Magical Drop (the best arcade game ever), Puzzle Fighter, and Bust-a-move/Puzzle Bobble are "like tetris."
Except Tetris is a game involving different shaped pieces where the objective is clearing lines, and the vast majority of other puzzle games are matching games.
It's like saying Tennis and is a "Baseball like sport" because they both use balls.
sig.
Blindingly obvious? Probably. Just the sort of blinding obviousness that makes this country great...
You can see the applet and a link to the paper here.
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
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Wonder what made me go read the whole article.
With profound apologies to whomsoever this sig originally belonged.
...
I still play it on my GBA... Have both Tetris worlds and Doom... also have a system link and play it all the time against my freinds at resturants screaming and cursing...
...the one game that has caused so many people around the world to just about go nuts trying to win a game...
You can win at Tetris? Oh man, I never knew! I'm probably like the only self-respecting computer nerd in the world that's never seen the ending...
the gameboy linkup cable probably wouldn't have sold that many units w/o tetris..
I can't recall any gameboys w/o a tetris cart lying close in ambush. I was still playing tetris on my cell phone to kill time until I got the treo270
it really goes to show that a good concept will have more longevity and pretty graphics. Now, where's the MULE and a decent Archon update??
-- I have enough stupid gadgets to know that I can do without -- http://www.modestneeds.org
I posted my comment before I saw yours. It's odd that our two comments are consecutive.
Peace.
Alric.
Ok, Gameboy Tetris (original, I still have my original pak, yah!); max level?
I have gotten to around 22-23, I think I hit 25 one time. Anybody get up to 30?
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Enjoy.
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
I remember when I was 7 years old. I was probably one of the last kids on the block to get a Nintendo. It was Christmas and my parents finally gave in and bought one for me.
Probably one of my most vivid memories of that time period was not playing the game myself, but my parents addiction to the game. For two people who thought video games were silly, they got very competative, very quickly. All of a sudden my bed time was enforced to the minute and moments after hitting the bed, I could hear the sounds of frustration and rubbing a new high score or number of lines in the spouse's face from my living room downstairs.
Even a couple winters ago, we went on a trip with some of my younger cousins who had a game boy color. Very quickly heated debates between my mom dad, and myself broke out as to who's turn it was to play that magical piece of purple plastic. I, of course, whooped up on them. Boo yeah!
The game is great. There are two scores to pay attention to: lines and actual score. There's the A game and the B game. And besides all that it exposed children to great music in the form of blips and bleeps. Too bad my Nintendo died last year. I think the only video games that have brought my family together like that are the old Sierra games like (Space | King's | Police) Quest on our Tandy 1000 and Myst.
How many people that have ever picked up any type of game console (and most calculators with power) have never played tetris? The Article is right. There is a version of this game for practically every type of computer that exists today. Anything programmable by hackers (relatively) easily, and there's Tetris.
And I had the Original Version of Tetris for the PC in Canada. My Dad picked it up in 1988, and my family was hooked. EGA graphics, seeing earth from Mir. That was a game. Level 9 was virtually unachievable. And we played endlessly.
Then the Game Boy came out. Heaven. Two players! My brother and I played endless matches against each other. On road trips, there was nothing else. Scenery? Whatever. Trying to get a Tetris to send my brother over the top. Winning by completing lines faster wasn't HALF as satisfying as killing the other guy. A non-violent game where you killed your opponent! What could be better?
And my PARENTS joined in. My Dad was a big computer geek from the get-go, but with Game Boy, even my Mom got in to it. She turned out not-bad for a while too! Occasionally (VERY occasionally) my Dad would even stop driving and let Mom drive, so he could play against us! And in the Family Room at night, playing against each other was often a nightly occurance.
Then High School. Graphing Calculators. Tetris fever again! Jytris is hands-down the best Tetris clone for the HP48/49. Anybody who's played it would agree. Physics 20/30 was bearable (Easy 90s, but BORING) because of that game alone. And Babal I'll admit, but still, my tetris addiction helped.
And then Tetris for the N64 (The Next Tetris). Not a bad game at all. Purists would object to being able to "save" a piece (I felt like I was cheating for the longest time), but the look-ahead, and new mono-squares and multi-squares objectives made an enjoyable new twist to my old obsession. And when playing 4-players at parties, I found that me and my friend Simon were always the targets. We completely dominated the competition. It was ALWAYS down to us two. Got so bad that we had to play hot-potato or else we'd get EVERYBODY's garbage. Hmm. Maybe shouldn't have played so much. We were both a little dominant players. Oh well.
Still, I can't think of any other game I'm still playing from the mid 80s (besides Arkanoid and Rampart the Arcade, but that's another story). I'm always on the lookout for those little pieces made up of four deceptively simple blocks. What other game have you ever actually DREAMED about? What other game do you actually think of scenarios in your head while daydreaming? This happened. Who else will admit it?
I broke my obsession down to a mere addiction a number of years ago. Who else can just not stop with the blocks? Who has been there since (near) the beginning?
Erioll
One day after work I played Tetris for about an hour. During my drive home on an L.A. freeway, I had to fight off the urge to constantly switch lanes and floor it every time I saw a space open up in one of the lanes ahead of me. There must be a word for this phenomenon, where the imperitives of a game get temporarily transposed onto some other activity.
was a old EGA version called egaint, which I had on an old 286. Google found me this list of 883 tetris files.
"There is also a very interesting history of tetris online"
Oh God, my *eyes* - how anyone could read through enough of that bright lavender text on black background to work out that the content is actually "interesting" is beyond me.
Someone miror it and convert it to something readable, before we blind an entire generation of geeks.
I think I've had over 710 lines before (1.7million points)... So I guess I've been to at least level 71. I am HIGHLY addicted during the school year though, and I should be embarrased by this fact. Selah.
Charlie
LTris is the best Linux port that I could find.
Here ya go...someday someone should write a script to preempt the /. effect and create mirrors.
Quick and dirty mirror of the article - black text on white background
I had the tetris for windows that came with the windows entertainment pack (win 3.1) and i played it so much that i got to the point where the score would reach the max 655xxx (something like that) and then it would start to go backwards, back to zero, and then go negative to -655xxx and then start going back up again. kinda cool.
"Madman driving on LA Freeway swerves in and out of lanes, ramps car off of bridge and escapes the cars subsequent explosion by mere seconds before whipping out a pistol and shooting a priest, an old woman, and a dog. He then kicked a pregnant woman in the belly and stole her car... He is considered armed and addicted to video games..."
hmm... but in LA would they notice??
You're right though, there should be a term.
Charlie
It took seventeen years, but this story finally fit in.
Have you read my journal today?
I'm surprised no one's mentioned SEXTRIS!!!!
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
I just was flipping through this old gaming mag today. They had a quote from Alexey, which went something like:
"I remember the first time I saw those shapes coming down the screen. I had no shape acceleration or point system, and I couldn't program them in because I was having too much fun playing the half-finished game."
Apparently the shapes looked like this then:
[][][][]
[]
and I mean, exactly like that. Simple text brackets. How beautiful is that? One of the best games ever made, nothing but text brackets; still addictive.
I gotta say though, half of the fun was the music. Where did all the good video game music go anyway? Tetris, Super Mario Bros, Frogger, Zelda. I can't remember the last time a game's theme music was stuck in my head all day.
c-hack.com |
Making being stuck on win9x bearable.
I had a GBC sitting next to me (with the original GB tetris of course, w00t! My original GameBoy though has dying pixels and such, heh, plastic protective cover over screen came off and the like) that I would keep on to play when ever I had to reboot my PC.
Ditto for HL, when ever a new map would be loading in DM, I would just play tetris! yaaah!
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I remember after one of the first marathon sessions of playing Tetris having dreams where I played the game... Several of my friends also shared the same experience..
I can remember my eyes moving in those jagged little patterns...
..........FULL STOP.
My seinor year of highschool I dug up a cheep used PowerBook to take notes on in class. Because it was an old color model it would suck the battey dry in about half an hour. This ment that I had to sit in the back of the class room where the "other" power was located. I quickly (after about 5 min) reallized that I could play Tetris and look like I was typing notes. My teachers thinking that I would have a hard time keeping up typing vs writing, wouldn't ask me any questions so as not to distract me.
I spent five days a week for nine months playing Tetris, my highest scores were during history classes, my lowest during art classes. My friends would ask me if they "use my notes" meaning that they had a really boring class coming up and they needed something to do.
since graduating I have played exactly 5 games of Tetris in 4 years.
"You can see I know very little about pimp policy." George McGovern.
I used to play Tetris using my TI-82 graphing calculator during Chemistry, Physics, and Calculus in H.S. Previous to that, I had Tetris (maybe a clone) on my Amiga 500. That game can really make time fly. There is a multiplayer version for the PC called Tetrinet that I also play every now and then.
Wow, I guess I was an "early adopter" then ;-) I always thought it to be older... My uncle, who happens to be a pilot for a major airline, brought me a copy of Spectrum Holobyte's Tetris for my 8088 when I was seven or eight years old (that's '86 or '87). It was one of my very first games, along with Boulder Dash II and Academy (strange game, btw ;-)
I tried to get that version running on my Athlon some months ago and was very disappointed that it does not even start. Downloaded that Tetris version from several abandonware sites all with that same effect. I guess I really have to finish my computer room and get one of my 286's or 386's running. Does anyone know if that Spectrum Holobyte PC version runs on them ?
I wonder what the real, original Tetris looked liked. Does anyone have a link to a screenshot ?
I can get the abandonware version to run not by double clicking it but by opening a dos window, navigate to the directory where its stored, and type tetris.
Heh, I find myself listening to Doom midi's frequently these days.
Tetris is an amaizing achievement considering what Electonica 60 was.
Electronica was a Soviet clone of one of DEC's RSX minis. I worked with one back in the 80s. It was a box 3 feet tall, 2 feet wide and 2.5 feet deep. It had two 8" floppy drives and 64KB RAM, no hard drive, monochrome video. One floppy held the OS (CP/M) and the other everything else. Its average time between failures was something like 1 week.
Tetris for the Game Boy. I have never found a game that equals the Game Boy version. Every other version has some little quirk, which I end up HATING. :)
:D
I might as well glue the cart into my circa 1989 Game Boy, as it's the only game I play on it anymore. Well, that, and half of the screen is worn out, and Tetris is the only game that I can see well enough to play.
Happy birthday, Tetris!
SIGFEH
I think half the developers I know have implemented Tetris at one time or another - in Turbo Pascal, as a Java Applet, on HP calculators - it's ubiquitous.
I'd done the Tetris thing in the 286 heyday, and considered myself too much into it. However, I'm sure there were people with greater levels of addiction. I mean, I only got to the point where I saw blocks descending in my mind's eye as I drifted off to sleep at night. There must have been people whose minds played Tetris like this during daylight hours.
I upgraded my needs for Tetris-ing to the Blockout game, which I consider to be the 3D version of Tetris. 3D blocks appear on the screen in wireframe; they drop away from you into a pit, and you can spin them +/- on each x, y and z axis. (In practice, I only use one vector of spin, since the spin rate is so fast, and it avoids confusion of which way to spin the cubes.) The blocks opaque as they settle in the pit, and of course the pit tends to fill up towards you.
I certainly don't play Blockout as much as I did at first, and I never play Tetris anymore. Rarely, I fire up Balltris -- it is like Tetris but uses groups of balls; the groups fall into a pit, and when they make touching patterns (each level of difficulty increments the number of same-colored balls that must be touching), they disappear and the balls cascade and collapse quite intriguingly. I also play Snood, which is like Bubble Trouble; it's kind of like a table pool type of Tetris.
But the Tetris, Balltris, Blockout and Snood types of games illustrate the remarkable gulf of difference between gamers. I can't stand the Doom and Everquest type of games; my thing is the blipping of colored bits of light into patterns, producing results, but under increasing difficulty until my dexterity and hand-eye coordination fail me. And they are over within 5 minutes, whereas Doom etc. can go on for hours and hours. The textually-graphic game Dungeons of Moria was as much as I could stand.
I recall playing Tetris and entering something I called the zone -- the place where you were one with the blocks, the rate of fall, and the clicking of the keys to spin, drop and fit each one as it appeared and hurtled downward. It may be that my understanding of sartori and various Zen statements developed from that feeling of the zone. Tetris as Zen training? Stranger things have happened.
[also misbehaves on Kuro5hin as Peahippo]
When that first came out, back in '88 or '89 I think I lost a week's productivity to it. I used to dream the tetris shapes quite often....
Comment removed based on user account deletion
For all you tetris people out there, check out TetriNET. It's tetris on the Internet! It has special attack blocks that you can obtain by clearing lines. It also has a pure mode for all you old school people out there. =) Pretty dang addicting.
Tetris On Drugs. Try keeping track of the pieces as the board is rotated in 3-space, zoomed, mirrored, and warped.
http://pineight.evilpigeon.net/tod/
I flunked a course in my first year of college because there was a Tetris coin-op in the student cafeteria.
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth. -- Fry
^^ why the hell does this quote come up so much? i see it at least once a month at the bottom of slashdot!
Tetris Attack is the best game ever, bar none. I've played through it countless times on Snes9x.
On Windows, Puzzle Station comes damn close, although it is no Tetris Attack.
BTW, Alexey now works in Microsoft.
Interesting thing is that he never got a penny from his creation - Soviet Union laws back then did not have any notion of IP.
Yes, it is an annoying color scheme. But if you highlight a block of text it reverses to a much better green on white (at least in IE).
I rejoice that there are owls.
did they including this in that study about video games lowering brain activity? The game drove me nuts but i would go in to a semi-trance state when plaing it... my mom and sister could get to level 14ish on the NES.. i think they are both brain dead.
I still have the original IBM PC 5.25" version co-incidentally enough bought about 17 years ago (I was around 6 at the time). I'm figuring that this original plastic CD like boxed version with its inlay card manual must now be something of an antique? Any offers? ;-p
And isn't the 17th anniversary about the weirest time to celebrate? Tetris can finally go to an R-rated movie!
Hmm... both / and . are tetris pieces too. I smell a conspiracy.
I design user interfaces for a free network management application,
Let's not forget gambling! Some of us are gambling addicts!
C'mon, do you really believe that? It's way easier to crank out another military-sim FPS than to come up with an actual original idea like tetris. Not that they haven't tried, but don't you think there's a reason my mom plays tetris but she's never heard of any of the other 10,000 puzzle games out there?
Search first, ask questions later.
fucking lamesness filter sucks a whole lot of cock fucking maggot peice of shit!
http://www.fileplanet.com/files/80000/89344.shtml
http://diesel.2y.net/video/tetris_japan_finals.mpe g
Here are a couple of links for a 12 Mb mpeg movie showing the finals for the Tetris championship in Japan...for those of you who haven't seen it. "Crazy tetris block stacking action at lightspeed!"I always had the biggest trouble with the square shaped pieces.
They never seemed to be oriented right, so I had to keep rotating them.
</dry humor>
That's what cut & paste and a text editor are for..
The only game I've never gotten tired of. I remember having a paper due in college. I sat down at 4 pm, played eight (8!) hours of Tetris, and wrote the paper in three hours.
Now that's Professional Procrastination.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
Its a fact that that game increases cognative thinking, especially in pre-teens. I assume some day they will make it a manditory game in school, as it is one of the greatest cause and effect games out on the computer.
:)
Either that or we are all just a bunch of blockheads
I prefer the music from the cartoon series, "The Super Mario Bros. Supershow"
All that marketing must finally be paying off.
this is the rocks. my cocks is hard!
In case anyone here is thinking about switching to The Z Shell, here's the perfect reason:
Tetris for zsh. It's a terminal-based version of the game that is implemented entirely in zsh commands.
Just source the file and then zle tetris (which you could bind to a keystroke) and off you go.
Try doing that in <your favourite shell>.
is ztretris, the one that runs on a ti-86 calculator.
the vim tetris!
If you are good at tetris you can play online tournament at WorldWinner.com against a or some opponent.
The nice part: you bet real money. If you are somewhat good you can make some cash. I really made 25$,around 37$CDN. I stopped since it was too hard to win when I was classified as "intermediate" and I was loosing all my earnings I won "newbie".
Try it at your own risk.. Very addictive. You get 5$ free when you join. Everything is VeriSign Certified.
I don't remember playing this on the computer - I'm probably not old enough. My first real exposure was the gameboy, and later the arcade machine which was inside on of our university buildings.
The arcade machine rocked! It had a nice two player mode, lovely music, and some fiendishly difficult variations on the original game.
I played that machine so much that I used to dream of falling shapes!!
Man, that stuff has been obviously prohibited because it was dangerously addicting, come from some dangerous country or both.
Tetris is addicting and comes from the source of all evils (URSS), so we better prevent our youth from playing it! Prohibite! Destroy all copies!
This way, we can be sure that everyone will be playing tetris, and the conquest of the world shall be complete. :)
Tetanus On Drugs. It will do your head in! Just when you think it is letting you relax, the spins and the fuzzies come back in, and then the zoom snaps into overdrive.
BBBbaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!
Alexey is working for Microsoft now. Buhahahahaha!
*
Was the buggy implementation that MS released. If you went above the 32K mark it would wrap around to -32K mark and start heading back towards zero (which I could never seem to get ~sigh~)
.. off course I do have the VIM one lying around somewhere ... since when did editor's become game *consoles*? :)
I even submitted a bug report to MS, however it must have just got swept under the carpet ~sigh~
Now back to installing XEmacs for Tetris
I was amazed at how marketing could kill a very good simple game. I bought the new tetris (Tetris Worlds) for the Gameboy Advance. I had to return it quickly because it not only failed to live up to the old ones, but was far far worse than those fake lookalikes.
Many games have been inspired by Tetris, anyone care to post their own favorites?
My personal favorites are Tetrinet(8 player tetris with weapons over the net. http://www.tetrinet.org/) and Super Puzzle Fighter (availble as a Mame rom, and a crappy PC port).
But if you highlight a block of text it reverses to a much better green on white
Nah, too much work. What you need to do is stare at it for a minute, then look at a blank white wall. Presto! Readable text.
c-hack.com |
emacs -f tetris
:)
'nuff said.
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
Hello there...
:)
:)
/GNU throws a flashbang in front of uncle Bill... /GNU throws a SG in front of Bill's plan /GNU gains some market share while Bill cant see :)
A few years ago I was right into my quakeworld.. And I found that after a long winning streak against what were basicly newbies, I could not bare to loose . On many occasions I could loose the plot, and I have broken many mice and keyboards, and even ripped my top off ( it was a good top too ) in a fit of rage.
I have since given up quake world, To mee it is simply a game that is too fast and agressive without a way to vent such agresssion.
IMO, if there was a way to exerciece while playing such a game, eg, optionally, to move you have to run on a treadmill thing or such like, then it would be a very fun game, because my anger would be let out while I run
I think another thing that would be neat is a large keyboard designed to be on a wall. You punch and kick the keys while viewing a projection of a screen.. so you could code or irc and get fit at the same time
But yeah.. I recon lots of games are bad.. but I still play them.. my latest addiction is that of CS. I have bought three copies of CS Retail.. I have twice deleted CS and broken the CD's simply because I was too addicted to get any work done.
Prohibition has also been wildly successful and popular in other problem domains, including... * Alcohol * Marijuana * Cocaine * Crack-type Cocaine * Heroin * LSD * Ecstacy * Child Pornography * Pornography * Sex * Cuban Cigars
You know you are right, lets just legalize any amount of anything... And see how it all works out.
However... my roommate is working on a tetris-style game for the Mac that is quite impressive and original called Khufu. Pretty addictive!
i traded in my gameboy ages ago for puter hardware, i think it was a 14.4 modem at the time. but i still play it a lot thanks to Liberty for Palm. Great gameboy emulator. just load up my tetris rom and play away... great time passer in the middle of boring lectures at school.
Can we move on from this tired old game?
Some of the 'official' story seems to be incorrect. I was involved in making the C64 version. The original C64 BASIC version was given to a friend of mine who added music and graphics and optomised it so it was playable on a 1Mhz machine.
I also question the PC version being the first as I was playing it on the '64 in 1985. For a more detailed history see my tetris page Neil
No sharp objects, I'm a programmer!
Someone is going to want to kill me for posting a link to this on slashdot... But... What the hell. = )
See a world class Tetris champ in action.
I think Woz's fantasy was the fantasy of most tetris player. He played tetris on the side of a building, that's taking it to a whole other level. See the pictures here http://bastilleweb.techhouse.org/
What, you never saw the dancers and the space shuttle at the ending?
Get Opera for your platform (http://www.opera.com), with a single click to a button, you can switch to "user mode" CSS which practically makes it a simple webpage ;-)
Did you ever notice that, when you fire up a new XEmacs tetris, the shapes always come in the same order (The random number generator must be seeded with the same number everytime).
Damn, I started to memorize half of the play until I realized that.
So, make sure you always hold down the 'n'-key for a while to make sure you'r not always playing the same game.
Some enlightened souls used to add a bit of functionality so that you could see where that piece would appear when you hit "down".
Which irked me even more. You've written a version of Tetis, you haven't got the control method right (when you hit down, the movement should speed up) and then you code additional functionality to help people deal with your incorrect implementation!
Worst offenders for this was nearly every version of Tetris for the Palm Pilot.
However after playing nearly all of them, I thankfully come across one that does it properly. Definately worth it.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Just like the russians to pull shady stuff like that. Every russian I know has no morals. In fact, one russian jew I know(going to a UC College and waaaay rich) went into COSTCO and stole like 30 toothbrushes. TOOTHBRUSHES!!!!! What are they like, $2 max? Anyways, and then she comes to me and was like "I got all the toothbrushes for free, WANT TO BUY ONE FORM ME?" And her shady ass stupid russian jew boyfriend stole a DVD player too. Shifty ass russians....grrrr.....I don't care if they are not communist anymore, they are still commies ta me ;-)
My freshman year at college, the campus paper did a survey on love/sex/etc.
This was 1989 and Tetris was quite the late-night procrastination tool before looking for MP3s, etc.
Included was a series of anonymous quotes about the stare of love on campus. I'll never forget, one female student said:
Love here is like Tetris. You never get the long piece when you need it.
"Never bullshit a bullshitter" All That Jazz
Theres only one True tetris in my eyes, the 1989 IOCCC Best Game winner, A true classic.
of course, it has been cleaned up and improved, and is now included as tetris-bsd in the BSD games collection.
ex$$
Some wannabe jock (IE, a lanky little prick who couldn't play sports, yet watched them on TV and talked as if he was an athelete.) kept calling me a communist and doing Chekov-like accents around me, as I often utilized my fun happy calculator to play Tetris.
This annoyed me, not because his accent was laughable, but because I do have a bit of Russian blood in me.
At any rate, I used to imagine large blocks dropping from the ceiling and impacting with his head, causing a nice geyser of brain-matter grey. He never did figure out why I'd get a shit eating grin on my face.
So why is this relevant? It isn't. I just have a lot of Tetris-related angst. The moral of the story is that this guy is now flipping burgers.
Given the line of thinking in our government with everything else, that sole fact should allow us to create a lobbying group to get an hour of Tetris playing time in schools across the nation.
Tetris! Logic! Good for the brain! Yeah!
And the idea behind it has transformed into that huge success that is Worms online in Korea (the world leader in online games - their games make ultima online and everquest seem like neighbourhood LANs by comparison).
man, the groaning and panting eminating from my ccomputer... was almost enough to make me want to leave my dorm room and find a real woman!
I think this kind of simple, addictive games can be just as dangerous as the "Violent, realistic and addictive" 3D Doom-style games. To give you a little idea:
When I was in the army, about ten years ago, we had a lot of time to kill, so a couple of my roommates got themselves a gameboy. Both of them had Tetris on it, and for a while we had a blast playing to see who could get the space shuttle, and when they got the link cable, we could play against each other too. After a while the others got tired of it, but not me. I kept playing, and shortly I found myself playing on two gameboys simultaneously.
It was when I realized that I kept seing the blocks and hearing the music after going to bed and until next morning I asked them to send the tetris games home, and I haven't dared play tetris since.
This message has been ROT-13 encrypted twice for higher security.
Nice site, I just wish they had more screenshots of various tetris versions.
;-) Especially the game boy version, which I liked best. Tetris also sparked a number of similar games. For example Puzzle Bobble. Anybody remember that? Very addictive, a friend of mine and I played that game for NINE hours straight. That night, I dreamt of those darned bubbles... It was not funny. ;)
I can't imagine how much time I spent with this damned game.
Dunno if everyone has seen this yet, but this footage from Japan is simply amazing. I can't beleive the human mind can play tetris at such a rate. =P
m l
http://www.fileplanet.com/files/80000/89344.sht
And as a bonus, an original Tetris download is available too...
-- Serge K. Keller
So is it true that the game calculates which block you need the most and then just doesn't give that one?
Bobby Prince released the music on his web site for a while, then, for bandwidth reasons, it was taken off, then published on mp3.com, then taken off (because mp3.com officials could not realise it was HIS copyright), than back on - but only some of the songs. you may find some of his duke nukem music there, too.
From Russia with FUN!! : D
"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
Kind of funny this should get mentioned since I just finished reading the chapters in Game Over, Press Start to Continue about Nintendo's long haul to gain the rights to Tetris for their new little system called the Gameboy. This was in 1989 and they went so far as to send Pazhitnov and Miyamoto to America to meet. Pazhitnov's kids where the only kids in all of Russia to own a Nintendo Entertainment System. The book does make an interesting point that Pazhitnov (atleast in the Gameboy era) basically saw no real money from the licensing deals because of the big old Iron Curtain...poor guy...hope he is rolling in the dough now!
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
A few months ago I was flying back to the uk from Malaysia. 14 hours in economy class of a 747.
There was a 10 year old kid in the seat behind me who was puking every half an hour.
There was a baby in in the seat infront of me soiling itself frequently and the woman holding the baby had her seat so heavily reclined that there was only 2 inches between my nose and the back of her seat.
The movies didn't work for my seat and so the ONLY thing that stopped me going completly crazy was tetris.
Apart from take-off and landing I spent the entire 14 hour journey playing that damn game.
Although i'm thankfull that tetris was there I hope I never EVER see that game again.
and legal ... hehe
I've written Tetris clones for every new operating system, computer, or API I've learned. OpenGL, DirectX, WinG, QuickDraw, BGI, SVGALib.....
It's almost a "Hello World", becuase it's so simple and so many people have done it.
I'm very fond of Seb's 3d Tetris for linux. ..
But let's not forget GTetrinet ah
http://fanblade.dhs.org:27902
...that Tetris has become successful despite what we're told we have to have in a successful video game. At no point does an extra-large "boss block" come down. There's no grand cinematics whenever you clear a level. And most of all, you can't win. Like Space Invaders, the blocks keep coming. You can't "beat" Tetris, you can only delay the inevitable.
Sometimes simpler is better.
working at Microsoft (ugh i know) as a Game Designer in the mid 90's, i had the pleasure of working with Alexey.
;)
at the time, he was a jovial guy, despite the sorted legal histories, with a thick Russian accent and loud, boisterous laugh.
i was tasked with designing a game that would popularize Windows as a gaming platform (a concern at the time, Win95 was just released) and was thinking about different ways to achieve this. i asked myself about why certain other games were hugely popular, and of course Tetris was on the list. i'd deemed the reason to be that in Tetris, the player does something that they do nearly every second of their waking life; recognizing and sorting information.
not long after, a new hire was announced in a separate games division. he was really the only other Game Designer at MS at the time, so naturally i sought a rapport; it was Alexey afterall!. we chatted about various things, men of similar ilk (on paper anyway), when one day, i just flat out asked him...
"Alexey, why do you think Tetris is so popular?"
he thought about it for a moment, me in silent anticipation realizing the absurdity of the situation; i'm once again talking with the designer of arguably the world's most popular game, when he finaly answered in his Russian-lined English accent...
"You know Joe, I think it's because it is...something that people do everyday."
i've been an even bigger fan of Alexey ever since
Anyone out there remember Tetris payout? I made a few thousand pounds on this in the early 90s in the UK. The machines only held 60 pound coins so you had to wait for them to fill up before you could emtpy them. At my student union bar the bar staff actually filled them up every Wednesday morning! There was always a queue of the local Tetris pros at this time!!!
The game was about scoring as many points in a limited time. If you scored enough then the machine paid money.
You scored more points by clearing lines at the top of the screen. So the trick was to build a platform and then score points high up the screen. The danger was that when the game got fast you would run out of screen.
I liked the game because there was none of this "score more points for clearing 4 lines at once" crap that you get on a lot of tetris games. There's a real skill in filling over a gap, clearing the line above and clearing the previous gap.
Other interesting features:
- Preview of about 10 upcoming blocks. If you could manage it you could do some serious planning ahead.
- Both left and right rotate buttons. It was amazing how many people only used one rotate button which often led them to pressing it 3 times! There was even one guy good enough to clear the machine that played this way.
The game play got faster each time a player won. This was designed to allow the machine to make money. I guess the idea was that it got too fast for people to empty. They must have had pretty crap testers though because it had an upper limit on the speed which was quite beatable - hard but beatable none the less.
The machines didn't last long because they were so easy to empty. A couple of years after they disappeared I found one and rubbed my hands with glee. Alas it had been doctored and ran at about double speed making it completely unplayable (for me at least).
Those were the days......
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
http://www.chroniclogic.com released Triptych this spring. It has some of the features you've always missed the most in the original, namely the ability to smack that blocking piece away and to squeeze a piece in between two others. This game is actually a physical 2D simulation of slightly bouncy blocks being jammed into a limited space.
They had to change the rules a bit to accomodate the more... ermm... physical nature of this game, but it's still near enough that I'd nominate it for Tetris clone of the year.
Have fun! I've had a lot!
BTW, Bobby Prince is the composer of all of Doom's music, hence him recording all these songs (as opposed to just being a guy that happened to record them to CD).
But yeah, the CD is awesome and I'm glad that I own a copy :)
And finally, a while ago I made a little remix of Doom's E1M1 soundtrack (3.08MB).
Now you want to talk good music in games? Not console games, I am talking the real deal - arcade games. How about these:
Bubble Bobble
Spy Hunter
Galaga
Gyruss (gotta love Bach)
Star Wars
So many others...
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Looks basically the same but includes a wallhack that shows you the next 5 pieces and an aimbot that automaticlly picks the best place to drop them.
RMN
~~~
So, who's up for a celebratory game of tetrinet? :)
Did anyone else ever play two tetris games at the same time? One with the left hand and one with the right? The Windows version is the best implementation I've found for doing this since you can play two player, the controls are in pretty good positions for each hand, and you can turn off the "penalize other player" option.
"Since the creation of the original Tetris game on an Electronica 60, there have been dozens of different incarnations of Tetris.." Remember Sextris? You had naked people making shapes with their appendages, if 2 "blocks" are positioned in a way to "exchange fluids" then they anhilated each other and you were rewarded with an orgasmic sound. 'Ohhhh!"
It was all the rage in my freshman dorm... Come to think of it, everything sex related was all the rage in my freshman dorm. Other than sports and school work, Beantown schools are basicly $35,000 a year whore-houses with great internet access. Maybe we should all go back to school.
Ozma [ozmaonline.com] (who have a thing for all that is Russian) did a version of that classic folk tune
So did Gregory Chekalin. Except his version sounds a bit like "Barbie Girl" by Aqua.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Tetris has had one of the most agressive lawsuits to protect IP rights in software history.
The Tetris Company LLC has backed off with respect to Tetris clones that do not use the trademarked name "TETRIS". Such versions include Tetanus On Drugs(tm) for Windows, Linux, and Game Boy Advance.
Will I retire or break 10K?
And then Tetris for the N64 (The Next Tetris). Not a bad game at all. Purists would object to being able to "save" a piece (I felt like I was cheating for the longest time), but the look-ahead, and new mono-squares and multi-squares objectives made an enjoyable new twist to my old obsession.
No, The Next Tetris was for PC and PS1. The New Tetris was for N64. And yes, you described The New Tetris accurately. Recently, The New Tetris has been cloned on Game Boy Advance. The gameplay is almost exactly the same, but with a new twist: the whole screen twists. Pick up Tetanus On Drugs, a GPL'd tetrisclone for Game Boy Advance, Windows, and Linux.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I bought the new tetris (Tetris Worlds) for the Gameboy Advance. I had to return it quickly because it not only failed to live up to the old ones, but was far far worse than those fake lookalikes.
Tetris Worlds sucked.
Tetanus On Drugs for GBA doesn't.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It's less than 1K. Controls: AnyAlpha key to select, SPACE to fire.
m e(0)); ; }
#include <stdio.h>
#include <termio.h>
struct termio n,o;
#define gtty(fd,arg) (ioctl(fd,TCGETA,arg))
#define stty(fd,arg) (ioctl(fd,TCSETA,arg))
#define ff fflush(stdout)
main(){
int a,b,s,m,u=1,c=0,t=0,h=0,z=0,g=0,e=10,v=150,l=1;
char d[80],f=48,i=32;
gtty(0,&o);gtty(0,&n);n.c_lflag &=~(ICANON|ECHO);n.c_cc[VMIN]=n.c_cc[VTIME]=0;
stty(0,&n);for(a=0;a<80;d[a++]=i);d[e]=0;srand(ti
while (c!='q'&&g==0){
if(u){printf("\r>%s< %c Level:%d Hits:%d Score:%d ",d,f,l,h,z,v);ff;u=0;}
c=getchar();
if(-1!=c){
u++;
if(c!=i){
if(++f>58) f=48;
}else{
m=s=0;
for(a=0;a<e;a++){
if(d[a]==f){
h++;m++;if(f==58) m++;
s+=m;for(b=a;b<e;d[b]=d[1+b++]);d[e-1]=i;a--;
}
}
z+=s;
if(s==0){z-=z>>2;putchar(7);}
if(h>=30){h=0;l++;for(a=0;a<e;d[a++]=i);v-=1+v/10
}
}
if(++t>v){
u++;t=0;g=1;
for(a=e-1;a>=0;a--){
if(d[a]==i) g=0;
d[a+1]=d[a];
}
d[e]=0;d[0]=48+rand()%11;
}
usleep(1e5);
}
stty(0,&o);puts("");
}
Winning by completing lines faster wasn't HALF as satisfying as killing the other guy. A non-violent game where you killed your opponent! What could be better?
How about a violent game where you killed your opponent? Like with a bazooka or something :)
GMD
watch this
Military maneuvers. Soldiers are standing in line and an officer is barking orders:
"Private Ryan! Left hand up, right hand to side, two steps forward march!"
Soldier lifts hands and takes two steps out of line - and promptly falls into a trench.
"Private Johnson! Hands to the side, two steps forward march!"
Soldier does as told and also falls into the trench.
This activity goes on for some time..
Finally, arrives a general, red-faced and mad as hell and yells at the officer: "You were specifically told at the briefing: NO TETRIS DURING THE MANEUVERS!!"
I don't think I can adequately convey to the youngin's out there -- the ones who weren't around during the golden age of the dial-up BBS -- the phenomenal reaction that accompanied the initial release of Tetris to the small online community back then. Nothing I've seen (not the release of Doom, or Quake, or Diablo) compared to the wave of excitement that hit the boards when Pazhitnov slipped us that game. For two or three days, I could hardly connect to any of my usual haunts cuz everyone was grabbing a copy. Seems silly in retrospec, but it really bowled us over.
Of course, we're also the guys who walked 5 miles to the only arcade that had Zaxxon.
Can I get a show of hands from people who, in the height of their Tetris playing days, would see the shapes falling when they closed their eyes to go to sleep?
I certainly experienced it and I've asked this of friends at various times and have invariably found others who experienced it.
I've wondered if this means that Tetris taps into our brain chemistry in some fundamental way, sort of like the virus in Snowcrash.
But the good thing about this version is that I always seemed to be able to fit the piece, no matter what it was.
The sounds were annoying when they weren't actually insulting, the lookahead would frequently lie (just infrequently enough that you'd find yourself trusting it at the worst possible time), and then of course the innovations like invisible blocks and pieces on the later levels.
It all comes together when you hear the "nyah-nyah" sound when it randomly takes a block away from a line you've almost completed...
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
For all your entertainment needs a la video game music (MIDI format), try VG Music. Sorted by systems ranging from the Sega Master System to the Atari Jaguar, alphabetized by game.
Here:http://www.somethingawful.com/inserts/article pics/ photoshop/classicart/protagonist_christris.jpg
'nuff said. :)
Not quite - how the heck do you get out of emacs once you're done playing? I'm sending this darn Linux PC back to Walmart right away!
Yeah, my whole lab was addicted to that version for ages. One tech with an MSc, two MSc students, wasting probably 100's of person-hours trying to get the high score. When one of us went to negative scores and started getting up to zero again, we just gave up and acknowledged that he was the king.
;-)
I think it's funny that you reported the bug to MS. It takes them forever to acknowledge and fix major security issues in the OS, and you thought that complaining about *Tetris* was going to help?
Freedom: "I won't!"
http://www.fatalsteps.com/ac/tetris_japan_finals.m peg
'j
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
I got my dad AND my grandma into Testris for the NES. MY dad still plays it to this day, but my grandma has since passed. I hope they have Tetris in heaven!
There's no "I" in Linux.. err..
Ahh, the wonder of college dorms... 2 years ago, someone came across a derivation of tetris called sextris...where you put guys and girls together in certain positions...one of my favoriate implementations of the game! (did i mention moaning sounds?)
students at brown university created the largest tetris game ever.. it runs linux, too.
There's no "I" in Linux.. err..
His last name is more commonly spelled Pajitnov with a j. Incidentally, he works at Microsoft as a game designer in the "PC Life" division.
I used to have a very good 3-D version of Tetris on my Mac. It was called FRAC. Does anyone remember that? Or know where I can download it?
Please mod him back up.
Did anyone else get the ad featuring tetris-like pieces being assembled for this article? Just a coincidence, right?
what the hell? Offtopic, maybe, but not a troll. I AM a gambling addict. I have to go figure out what I'm going to bet on game one of the Texas doubleheader today.
I was told years ago (pre 1991) by someone that Tetris was written by a Russian and then stolen by Nintendo because of the potential it had. Of course I could totally be wrong, but it would be neat if I wasn't. I think.
"Truth suffers from too much analysis." Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah
I still play Tetripz. It's a psychodelic DOS tetris game, with cool effects and stuff that really make the game even more nerve-racking than usual.
It gets really insane when it starts flipping the screen upside-down and bending it, reversing your keys at random so left goes right, etc :) It's supposed to be a simulator of playing tetris under the influence of different drugs... But I just think its one bad ass tetris game!
It's true, I used to have one, way back when.
Don't believe me ? See here !
It ruled as well, Tetris anywhere, on the sly ! I think they did versions of mario and Zelda for those watches as well.
Alexey Pazhitnov created the one game that has caused so many people around the world to just about go nuts trying to win a game that has the ability to slowly drive you to insanity one small misshappen block at a time.
An english teacher is crying.
mstyne: real name, no gimmicks
I've never even owned a friggin game of Tetris, in any form, and now the music is stuck in my head! Thanks. Well, I was thinking of programming my own version anyway. I've just had a totally |33+ idea for it too, but I aint tellin
Here, this may ease your cravings: http://www.kohina.com/ Enjoy! ;-)
Ali
Ph33r m3!!!
If you havn't played Crack-Attack, you should. aluminumangel.org/attack/
shareware-ish, for dos, vga graphics (or maybe even svga), nasty (it would move the bottom of the play field up or randomly add blocks, you could buy weapons like bombs or snake stoppers...
does anyone else remember this?
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
I wanted to try it, but even after the help I have no idea what is meant with
Is is a default key under unix?
HHELP
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_7 18000/718009.stm