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Tetris Turns 25

teh.f4ll3n writes "25 years ago a Russian (Soviet) researcher thought of one of the world's most popular games. It is now that we celebrate its 25th anniversary. 'Twenty-five years ago, inside the bowels of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, a young artificial intelligence researcher received his first desktop computer — the Soviet-built Elektronika 60, a copy of an American minicomputer called a PDP-11 — and began writing programs for it.'"

19 of 177 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Summary by Millennium · · Score: 5, Funny

    One of the great travesties of gaming, that. The man got little more than a new computer and a modest bonus.

    In America, you get games and play them. In Soviet Russia, you make games and get played!

  2. Oh Great by sys.stdout.write · · Score: 2, Funny

    Now I'm going to have the Tetris song stuck in my head all day.

    Thanks, Slashdot.

    1. Re:Oh Great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      HAHA! I've been whistling Theme A for about 10 minutes and didn't realize it until reading your comment. 0_o

      Tetris has an amazing effect on the brain.

  3. Re:Best of Arcade games by Red+Flayer · · Score: 5, Funny

    Who has not tried to arrange blocks even in real life after getting hooked onto Tetris.

    I know, right? I mean, in high school I got a summer job loading hay bales into trucks just to work on my Tetris skills.

    It had the unfortunate side effect of sculpting my upper body into the form of Adonis, and all the attention from women prevented me from playing Tetris as much as I wanted -- but man, my fitting-blocks-into-a-confined-space skills really blossomed that summer.

    If you graduated from playing Tetris to moving blocks in real life, you may have had a problem.

    Or maybe it's me with the problem, as I simply cannot comprehend the depths of your nerdhood. I bow before you, nerdly master.

    --
    "Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
  4. Re:Summary by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 5, Funny

    Gaming? Tetris was no game. It was a highly effective Soviet plot to destroy the productivity of Western nations. This was achieved both by direct diversion of billions of man hours of work time, and by brainwashing: replacing the normal thoughts of the workers by images of falling blocks even when they were not using the program.

  5. Re:One Quarter of A Century... by MadKeithV · · Score: 5, Funny

    That's just because you go to parties made up mostly of squares.

  6. Re:Summary by Andtalath · · Score: 3, Funny

    Also, he's working for Microsoft.
    Talk about lousy rewards.

  7. Re:Summary by dkleinsc · · Score: 5, Funny

    Also, Western workers caught by it had a reduced ability to reproduce, thus making future generations smaller and weaker than their Russian and Chinese counterparts.

    --
    I am officially gone from /. Long live http://www.soylentnews.com/
  8. Re:Summary by oldhack · · Score: 2, Funny

    And don't forget its evil twin, the Rubik's Cube.

    --
    Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
  9. Re:If your browser supports SVG by gEvil+(beta) · · Score: 4, Funny

    Posted at 11:37AM
    (e.g. Firefox) http://www.croczilla.com/svg/samples/svgtetris/svgtetris.svg

    Posted at 11:52AM
    Wow, where did THAT hour go?....

    It clearly went into some sort of timewarp where an hour now equals 15 minutes...

    --
    This guy's the limit!
  10. Re:Summary by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Funny

    Gaming? Tetris was no game. It was a highly effective Soviet plot to destroy the productivity of Western nations.

    Gorbachev: Ah, KGB Agent Pajitnov, how goes Projekt Tetris?
    Pajitnov: Uh, not so good.
    Gorbachev: Nyet? Why not?
    Pajitnov: Yeah you see the Tetris, it did preoccupy them but they have all developed very specialized hand-eye coordination ...
    Gorbachev: Meaning?
    Pajitnov: Well, they will be better surgeons and ...
    Gorbachev: And?
    Pajitnov: Well, our superior MIGs may have problems if they figure out how to hook them up to their F-16 fighter jets ... and also ... well ...
    Gorbachev: Yes?
    Pajitnov: I've read this new American instruction manual called Ender's Game and our problems may be much larger than we initially thought ...

    --
    My work here is dung.
  11. Auto Insurance by jsnipy · · Score: 2, Funny

    Did Tetris' auto insurance rates go down?

    --
    -- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
  12. I guess by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    ...This guy has been playing for 25 years then...

  13. Re:Best of Arcade games by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 2, Funny

    It had the unfortunate side effect of sculpting my upper body into the form of Adonis, and all the attention from women prevented me from playing Tetris as much as I wanted -- but man, my fitting-blocks-into-a-confined-space skills really blossomed that summer.

    Wow, I wouldn't have guessed this guy was on Slashdot!

  14. Re:Summary by SteveWoz · · Score: 5, Funny

    But who managed to play Tetris on the 14-story sci-library building at Brown University one cold night?

    And who was repeatedly the top scorer at Gameboy Tetris in the Nintendo Power lists? It got to where they wouldn't print my name any more so I sent in the photo of my score spelling my name backwards, Evits Kainzow, and they printed it. This was back around 1988.

    So many things to measure and remember life by...

    --
    OK a new size TV
  15. Re:Summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Hi Stive!!!

  16. Hum by KlaymenDK · · Score: 3, Funny

    I was going to say something witty, but the characters of the two-liner matched up so perfectly that they disappeared in a puff of points.

  17. Bastard Tetris by domatic · · Score: 2, Funny

    http://fph.altervista.org/prog/bastet.html

    There was a /. article about it a few years back. It always tries to choose the worst possible block for the next block coming up. Need that long 4 square block? You'll get a evilly oriented z-block....

  18. Re:Summary by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Funny

    The joke's on them. I am now an expert box and grocery bag packer.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"