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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"
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"
I must have played too much Tetris, I can't tolerate much anymore. I did find the tetris game on the side of that building at Penn State or wherever pretty interesting. Any got linkage?
What?
Play javascript tetris online here.
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.
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.
I really can't stand playing chess on a computer. Even 3D chess doesn't cut it for me. There's something about having an actual board there that makes it easier to play than looking at pictures on a flat board or silly animations.
What?
.....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 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.
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!
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.
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
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
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
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!
You've finally figured it out, all those years of silence at the chess club, when what we really needed was blasting techo track (with light effects) to get the punters in.
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
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
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.
ummm.....thats how you have to drive in LA traffic, regardless of what you were doing before
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
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 |
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'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]
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!
Random is the New Order.
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.
I agree, I don't know how many times my parents asked me or my brother to do something and we'd be like "just a minute" because we were on some place in a game that couldn't be paused or the like. Yet give them a video game and you need a crowbar to get them off :)
I actually would think that many people would have had such stories, since 'video games' in most cases are ahead of many of our parent's times in terms of something you could play at home as opposed to arcades (at least back in the early 90's). It would be interesting to see how many others have stories to ours...
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>
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>.
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!!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
So is it true that the game calculates which block you need the most and then just doesn't give that one?
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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
~~~
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
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.
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.
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
Ok, I still have no clue how to watch the value of a variable in vim. but \te does something. and :help mapleader does not help (yes it displays text. )
thx