Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Tetris Turns 25

Posted by timothy on from the where-were-you dept.

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.'"

33 of 177 comments (clear)

  1. Summary by Darkness404 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
    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. Re:Summary by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Informative

      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!

      Uh, to be fair, it was really the British and the Hungarians that began the ruination of Pajitnov's rights. From Wikipedia:

      The IBM PC version eventually made its way to Budapest, Hungary, where it was ported to various platforms and was "discovered" by a British software house named Andromeda. They attempted to contact Pajitnov to secure the rights for the PC version, but before the deal was firmly settled, they had already sold the rights to Spectrum HoloByte. After failing to settle the deal with Pajitnov, Andromeda attempted to license it from the Hungarian programmers instead.

      There's no way you could (at that time) stop the same thing happening to an American. I think this history of litigation and the international scene of respect for software rights had a lot more to do with it than him being Soviet. Also, note that he sold the rights to this game to Spectrum HoloByte in Russia so he got the initial money he was looking for at least for Russian distribution rights it seems. Did he really get played or just fail to realize how great his game was? Sad when someone sells oneself so short but it happens even today, doesn't it?

      --
      My work here is dung.
    3. 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.

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

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

    5. Re:Summary by 117 · · Score: 3, Informative

      I don't know how reliable it is, but this link mentions that Alexey Pajitnov didn't have anything to do with the making of Clockwerx, he simply "introduces" the game

    6. Re:Summary by TinBromide · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
    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 Xaositecte · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    9. Re:Summary by Jurily · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think this history of litigation and the international scene of respect for software rights had a lot more to do with it than him being Soviet.

      As a Hungarian, I think if we knew he was a Russian, we'd spread it even faster across the globe. (Note this is 1985, before the fall of the Iron Curtain. We didn't like those guys.)

    10. Re:Summary by FishWithAHammer · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Programs should be free.

      Yeah, it's not like they take any effort to make and it's certainly not like the creators shouldn't be compensated if they so wish.

      NetHack's DevTeam doesn't want money for what they do--awesome. Somebody else does--it's their call.

      --
      "You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
    11. Re:Summary by asdf7890 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Uh, to be fair, it was really the British and the Hungarians that began the ruination of Pajitnov's rights

      It was far more complex than that. The BBC did an interesting documentary about the history and rights issues of the game a few years back (around the 20th anniversary IIRC). They got fairly frank interviews with people involved at the time (including the man himself, some of the developers and business people who were fighting for the publishing rights, and the Russian civil servant whose job it was to play all the suiters off each other). Well worth a watch.

      Search for "tetris from russia with love" - if you can't find it to purchase/rent/stream legitimately I'm sure you'll find a copy on your preferred alternative online TV source...

    12. Re:Summary by Maximum+Prophet · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Philo I Farnsworth got screwed out of the rights to Television. Inventors almost always get the short end of the stick, unless they sell out and become businessmen. Who's richer Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak? Edison got rich because he was a great businessman.

      --
      All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
    13. 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.
    14. Re:Summary by Jurily · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Wow, you disapproved of the Soviet regime so you were prepared to punish those innocents suffering under it? You sound like a real jerk.

      We were the innocents suffering under it, moron.

    15. Re:Summary by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Who's richer Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak?

      Jobs, but most of his personal fortune comes from NeXT and Pixar, not from Apple. Wozniak did well enough out of Apple not to need to work ever again.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    16. 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
    17. Re:Summary by timeOday · · Score: 4, Insightful
      I don't think striking it rich by writing a simple but hugely entertaining video game was a road to riches for any citizen of the Soviet Union... was it? Which is the downfall of communism, in a nutshell.

      Though he probably wouldn't have got rich in the US either. The school or company would have asserted ownership rights since the computer he developed it on, was theirs. Which is the downfall of capitalism, in a nutshell :)

    18. Re:Summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      Hi Stive!!!

    19. Re:Summary by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 4, Insightful

      We were the innocents suffering under it, moron.

      All citizens of all countries of the Warsaw Pact were suffering under it. Russians were no exception. In fact, if you go by the numbers of victims, Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians took the worst of it.

      It is rather sad to see the Soviet oppression - which applied to everyone, regarding of their nationality or ethnicity - being recast as Russians oppressing other nations nowadays in Eastern Europe, and the associated Russophobia.

    20. Re:Summary by Risha · · Score: 3, Informative

      It's called the Tetris effect, believe it or not. Even people with anterograde amnesia experience it, despite not remembering playing the game!

  2. If your browser supports SVG by MillionthMonkey · · Score: 4, Interesting

    (e.g. Firefox) http://www.croczilla.com/svg/samples/svgtetris/svgtetris.svg

    1. 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!
  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:One Quarter of A Century... by MadKeithV · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  5. BBC Documentary by Orome · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  6. And here is steriogram tetris by E+IS+mC(Square) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Thanks for the link. Here is another interesting version - stereogram tetris: http://3dimka.deviantart.com/art/3D-Stereogram-Tetris-36795242

  7. Pajitnov bad man by heri0n · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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)

    1. Re:Pajitnov bad man by bonch · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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?

  8. Tetristory by DynaSoar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  9. Another kind of Twilight Zone by dword · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

  10. Tetris predcessor: pentamino by sw155kn1f3 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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 ;)

    --
    - Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
    - Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
  11. 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.

    --
    "Good news, everyone!"