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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.'"
Without doubt, the best of all the arcade games ever. Who has not tried to arrange blocks even in real life after getting hooked onto tetris.
(e.g. Firefox) http://www.croczilla.com/svg/samples/svgtetris/svgtetris.svg
...seven years ago; JNLP-enabled launcher and code and whatnot are here.
It was a great exercise, and among other things it taught me that just because I had skimmed through Game Programming Gems I didn't really know how to code up a game.
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I'd highly recommend getting hold of the BBC documentary "Tetris : From Russia with love". Link
Also, there was a game design challenge a few years ago at GDC. Mr. Pajitnov was one of the participants (and the eventual winner I think), and I loved the way he approached the problem
Link
Thanks for the link. Here is another interesting version - stereogram tetris: http://3dimka.deviantart.com/art/3D-Stereogram-Tetris-36795242
not quite true. Since the fall of the soviet union, he moved to the united states and formed the tetris company which holds all rights and gets money from every tetris game made since 1991 or so. While the wikipedia says he didn't profit, thats just because he didn't profit from the NES or gameboy versions.
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I still remember L-Block winning the 2008 GameFAQs Character Battle.
It seems like one of the more unique situations where protections under some sort of patent law might be justifiable. There's little doubt that the idea was unique and non-obvious, but that upon release, reimplementation was trivial.
Should Alexey Pajitnov be granted exclusive rights to release games with Tetris-like gameplay for limited time? Is it in society's best interest? Or do we benefit more by allowing the knockoffs to continue? After all, there's no clear evidence that lack of rules protection has STOPPED unique and interesting games from coming out.
I'm curious to get people's opinions.
This is also a guy who screwed his friends over once he made the big bucks. Vladimir Pokhilko [sfgate.com] eventually killed his family and himself. Vadim Gerasimov [oversigma.com] who ported the original game to MSDOS and was one of the original developers did not receive any credit for his work. I have been playing Tetris a lot lately on Nintendo DS and on Facebook and love it. However, I hate Pajitnov for not making this game more freely available. I used to play Tetris on a Korean gaming site netmarble.com (it was also available on similar site hangame.com). These versions were also highly addictive and had a huge userbase (easily over 10,000 users). They were shut down due to threats of legal action from the Tetris company... If Tetris were only released under the GPL... (Hangame has licensed tetris since)
Isn't this backwards science? The Western workers caught by it are, on average, smaller and weaker than their non-gaming counterparts. If they don't reproduce, then all that's left to reproduce will be the ones who value things like "outside" and "sunlight" more than video games. Their children will share those traits, and the game-players will die off as befits any evolutionary branch with a poor (nonexistent?) reproductive strategy.
And who can forget the years lost playing Tetrinet?
Nothing like playing with a bunch of friends over a LAN or the Internet... Heck, I still remember some of the crazy cheats that were possible by misusing the text box. (They don't work anymore, and most servers will kick you if you try).
I had some nice Tetrinet themes (a few MIDs of the Tetris music, plus a nice "cheater" skin...).
Two uses Tetris has been put to over the years:
Training through Neurofeedback (EEG biofeedback) kids with ADD to be able to maintain attention despite distractions.
Preliminary testing of helicopter pilot trainees in the Hungarian air force; testing ability to maintain attention with increased activity. EEG was used to validate the early results, but the after that the game score itself was adequate.
As for Pajitnov not getting his due, it was after all, Soviet Russia. Nobody got, or could even expect, getting something due them across the Iron curtain. This was only a game. There was an complete cyrillic based Apple //e system produced over there for years. The major stimulus for that? AppleWorks 1.3 was being used as the primary inventory data handling app by the Red Army from the unit level up. Version 1.4 was hacked to work on their cyrillic machine. Apple never saw dime one from any of that.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Not sure if this game was any popular in US or Europe, but it was quite popular in USSR circa 80s (for small kids of course). I had the game and very much enjoyed it.
I still have it at my mother's.
Here's the link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentomino
So it's not very hard to guess where the guy got idea from. Of course this takes a lot of luck and genius to turn into addictive game ;)
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Wow. What a fascinating history. Thank you for that. I knew Tetris deals had a checkered past, but did not know it was behind rise and fall of mighty companies of 80s,90s and today. And sad story too, how the inventor of the game got almost nothing out of it!