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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"
...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 think everything is starting to fall into place. ;)
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
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
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
22 was my max in my prime. I was fortunate enough to have played in the preliminary Nintendo World Championships on stage (hey - I was young and video games weren't *as* dorky). Tetris was the last of three back to back games that were played, so I did a lot of "training" beforehand.
*sigh* If I only had time for that sort of stuff now... I still find time to sneak a gameboy round in, though.
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]
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>
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. :)
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
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!
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.
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
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
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!
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
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