Tetris

Creating a game out of Building Blocks

Walking around an arcade in the early 90s, you’d see all the classics — Street Fighter, Pac Man, Pole Position, maybe a few pinball machines¹ and … Tetris. Amidst all the fighting, racing, and avoiding enemies you’d see people crowding around a console trying to … arrange shape.

Typical Tetris Gameplay. Image from Wikimedia Commons

Alexey Pajitnov’s Tetris was unlike anything else when it released —tetrominoes² fall from the sky and the player can rotate and arrange them so as try and fill up complete lines, which then disappear. If you can’t make the lines disappear, the board will fill up and once a piece goes over the top then it’s sad trombone, game over.

How great is that? So great that Pajitnov’s original implementation didn’t even keep score, and it was addictive! Later Pajitnov (with others) ported it to the IBM PC, and copies quickly floated around the USSR and then was quasi-legally exported so that us capitalist pigs could get in on the fun.³

Since then, Tetris holds the Guinness record for “most ported videogame.⁴” It’s everywhere. You can watch it on Twitch. Videos analyzing or replaying the latest world record (or competitions) are on Youtube, and you can watch summary videos because the best played games can take a while. It’s a far cry from when college-aged me paid approximately eight-cents per minute of game play.

Honestly, there’s really nothing to say about Tetris⁵. It’s one of the best selling Game Boy games of all time. So many video games now require multiple gigabytes of audio, video, voice actors, teams of developers building a game on top of a state of the art graphic engine, supplemented by a marketing department trying to make this game stand out from the pack.

Tetris required just one great idea, one guy, and a few months as a side project then spread like Wildfire across the Soviet Union, then the world. I don’t think there’s any debate that this is a first ballot entry in the 100 Most Influential Games of the 20th Century.

Note — This will be the last game entry this year, but I plan on doing a year in review during the Holidays.

1. But much as slot machines dominate casinos (because they have a better return on investment per square foot of floor space), pinball machines were squeezed out by arcade games, which typically ate quarters much faster, were smaller, and required less maintenance due to fewer moving parts.

2. The shapes that can be built out of four squares touching orthogonally.

3. Wikipedia’s page on Tetris has more of the history, but it was the Wild West (and Wild East) as Pajitnov technically did not own the IP under Soviet Law, a fact that the businessmen who made a deal (via an unsigned telex letter!) either didn’t know or didn’t care or both. And then when it went international and various deals conflicted and … well, it was also a complicated problem of trying to pack things together.

4. A fact which made searching on videogamegeek not easy.

5. Which makes it a nice, easy article to end the year with (searching aside).