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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.'"
And because the summary doesn't tell you, that researcher was Alexey Pajitnov, who, despite creating Tetris made comparatively little money off of it even though it is one of the most iconic games of all time and helped revolutionize handheld gaming.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
(e.g. Firefox) http://www.croczilla.com/svg/samples/svgtetris/svgtetris.svg
Now I'm going to have the Tetris song stuck in my head all day.
Thanks, Slashdot.
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
...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.
The Army reading list
That's just because you go to parties made up mostly of squares.
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
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.
Who has not tried to arrange blocks even in real life after getting hooked onto tetris.
Ask Homer Simpson.
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)
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
Wait a minute... are you implying that intellectual property should be considered property? People should get paid for their ideas? On Slashdot? And you're getting modded Informative? *
* the ideas expressed in this post are not my beliefs, they are presented only for their ironic humor
Did Tetris' auto insurance rates go down?
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
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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- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
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!
Comment of the year
Uh, why should he make his game "more freely available?" Why would you hate him for protecting his property so that he can make a living?
But what exactly is his property? Had Pajitnov patented Tetris, it would have expired by now. Copyright is not intended to protect game rules, and I don't see how trademark would apply to games with names like Lockjaw. The Tetris Company's claim that other tetromino games are copies of Tetris starts to sound like SCO's claim that Linux is a copy of UNIX.
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.
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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....
Appropriately referred to as "The Tetris Effect"
Sturgeon was an optimist.
For multiplayer where you send garbage to your opponent, what you want is Tetris for the Nintendo DS. As essential on the DS as it was on the earlier Game Boys, this is a tremendous value in that you can do a 10-player local (line of site) game when only one of you has the cartridge. You can also play against three people online.
Ooh, and they released Tetris via WiiWare and its multiplayer lets you send garbage as well.
I always loved Tetris Attack for the SNES (and Gameboy Color), and was disappointed that they didn't include that as one of the modes in Tetris DS. However, Planet Puzzle League plays very similarly.
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