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"

Comments

The GameBoy's popularity...

[Anonvmous Coward]

...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.

Re:I still play it.

[Patik]

When I bought Tetris DX for GameBoy Color, the store clerk chuckled and asked me why in the world I was paying $30 for Tetris when I could have any number of action games. I asked him how many of those types of games he played for more than a year, and he couldn't answer me. Tetris just keeps on going.

IP Rights

[MeowMeow Jones]

Tetris has had one of the most agressive lawsuits to protect IP rights in software history.

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?

Re:IP Rights

[proxima]

Funny, that Tetris can be so effective in removing similar games, but I Hasbro (which now owns Microprose) hasn't seemed to have complained about FreeCiv.

Not that I'm complaining. I've played FreeCiv and I still bought Civ III - I don't think sales are suffering because of it - both games are fun in different ways.

You can't win, you know...

[billbaggins]

Someone at the U of MN Geometry Center created a proof that if the S and Z shapes alternate for long enough (the ceiling he gave was something like 70,000 pieces) you absolutely must lose (depending, of course, on the exact geometry of the well). Even had a Java applet that allowed you to try it yourself...

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.

Re:You can't win, you know...

[billbaggins]

If I remember right, the argument went something like this:

1. If you get X pieces that alternate S and Z, you will lose, no matter how good you are.
2. There is a nonzero probability of this event occurring in any given X-piece string.
3. Any event with nonzero probability must occur eventually (assuming randomness and a few other things that probably don't actually apply).
4. You will eventually get X pieces that alternate S and Z.
5. You will eventually lose, no matter how good you are.

Useless? Probably. But when has that stopped a mathematician who's looking for a grant? (I've been one, I should know!)

Interesting quote

[jcsehak]

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.

Re:Interesting quote

[Dirtside]

If you can find it, id Software had a guy named Bobby Prince rerecord much of the music from DOOM and DOOM II with real instruments. It's very listenable, especially if you're familiar with the music (from having spent way too much of your youth playing such games!). I tend to cue up the MP3s of those tracks at least once or twice a week while coding at work.

The album itself is called, I believe, "Doom Music." Probably eBay is your best bet, or something similar; I doubt you're going to find a copy in stores (maybe in a used music store).

Re:Interesting quote

[guttentag]

Where did all the good video game music go anyway?

I understand the appeal of a relatively simple tune (like the three Tetris tracks), but I think as the industry has moved toward CD-quality audio, it has found it cheaper/hipper to use existing music than to hire a composer. PlayStation games are notorious for this -- I sometimes wonder if the developers are paying to use the music or if the studios are paying the developers to "push" their music to a captive, impressionable audience.

Composer Nobuo Uematsu and Final Fantasy's music have developed quite a following over the years. The tradition of original soundtracks has survived in the Final Fantasy Dynasty because players have come to expect each new FF to raise the bar for the rest of the industry's music.

I remember making my own tape of FF2's soundtrack by hooking my SNES up to my tape recorder. FF3 had equally memorable, thematic music. FF7 was a whole new ballgame -- someone in my college dorm reached the game's final battle WAY before the rest of us (he didn't sleep much), and we stood around the TV in awe as we realized the track contained actual singing. It was actually creepy, because we thought it was coming from somewhere else until the voices began chanting the name of the bad guy. In particular, I recommend the orchestral version of the Final Fantasy VIII soundtrack.

Regardless of the quality of the music, I think one's impression of the associated game influences your appreciation of the music. With that in mind, I'd suggest playing the games before diving into the music.

Best version ever:

[x136]

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. :)

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. :D

Happy birthday, Tetris!

Tetris, Balltris, Blockout, Snood

[Peahippo]

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.

Re:palm pilot fun

[Drakonian]

What's the best version of it for Palm? I've never found one that had satisfactory controls/proper playing with, etc. Any links? Thanks!

Re:Thank you, Alexey, for Tetris...

[bugg]

Looking at the strings in a sOL.EXE binary from windows 98, microsoft claims copyright on Microsoft Solitaire from 1991-1998- leading me to suggest it was developed for windows 3.1 (windows 3.1 being the earliest version of windows that I touched I can attest to the fact that it was there). This makes xsol 3 years older than windows solitaire by my count (source: Solaris manpage)

Hope that helped.

Weird tetris implementations

[DeborahArielPickett]

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>.

Tetris tournaments for everyone

[wilbrod]

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.

Tetris arcade machines..

[stevey]

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!!

The best thing about the game ...

[Pyrometer]

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~)

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 .. off course I do have the VIM one lying around somewhere ... since when did editor's become game *consoles*? :)

Why emacs is better than vim:

[wdr1]

emacs -f tetris

'nuff said. :)

-Bill

The real pre-history of Tetris

[soundman32]

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

Xemacs tetris

[affenmann]

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.

Re:Eye hand coords along with reflexes

[archen]

I recall taking a job aptitude test where one of the sections tested how good your spacial orientation (I think that's what they called it anyway) was. The object was to figure out what some weird shape would be inside-out. I recall thinking, "hey, this is just like Tetris". I scored the maximum possible in that section and finished before everyone else. Actually I don't think anyone else even finished. Not long after taking the test I became very afraid. Had Tetris actually IMPROVED my skills at something? Scary thought.

Two games at once?

[honcho]

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.

Wesleyan Tetris on the Mac

[Dr. Manhattan]

A wonderful Tetris version, the point of which was to be as annoying as possible. Not unlike the character from Star Trek...

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...

Re:Tetris dreams

[Kredal]

It gets worse than that... I used to see the blocks come together in the words of books I was reading at the time.. I would lose sight of the meaning of the text, and just see the falling blocks.

Re:I still play it.

[navyrain]

Ever play that god awful version of tetris on the long flights that Continental has? *Shudder* Tetris at 1fps is a horrible way to entertain yourself.