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.'"

Comments

Summary

[Darkness404]

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.

Re:Summary

[Millennium]

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!

Re:Summary

[eldavojohn]

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?

Re:Summary

[Waffle Iron]

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.

Re:Summary

[TinBromide]

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.

Re:Summary

[dkleinsc]

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.

Re:Summary

[Xaositecte]

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.

Re:Summary

[Jurily]

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.)

Re:Summary

[FishWithAHammer]

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.

Re:Summary

[eldavojohn]

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 ...

Re:Summary

[Jurily]

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.

Re:Summary

[SteveWoz]

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...

Re:Summary

[timeOday]

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 :)

Re:Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi Stive!!!

Re:Summary

[shutdown -p now]

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.

If your browser supports SVG

[MillionthMonkey]

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

Re:If your browser supports SVG

[gEvil (beta)]

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...

Re:Best of Arcade games

[Red Flayer]

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.

Re:One Quarter of A Century...

[MadKeithV]

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

BBC Documentary

[Orome]

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

And here is steriogram tetris

[E IS mC(Square)]

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

Tetristory

[DynaSoar]

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.

Another kind of Twilight Zone

[dword]

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