Are you old enough to remember playing this geometric video game with a catchy Russian folk tune while growing up in the 1980s? Well, me neither. Luckily for us, this video game became so popular in the last 40 years that its innovative but simple gameplay design is recognizable to nearly anyone.
Tetris was developed by Russian-American computer scientist Alexey Pajitnov in 1984. The idea for this video game came from the puzzle game Pentominos, where the pieces contain five squares, rather than the Tetris four. Pajitnov named the game by combining the word “tetra,” meaning “four” in Greek and “tennis,” which is his favourite sport as stated on the Tetris website.
It was first released for Electronika 40, a cumbersome Soviet computer, and then in 1985 became available on IBM PC, no less cumbersome but a more successful computer. In 1988, Tetris became a ‘software blockbuster’ after its release on Bullet-Proof Software (the company owned by an American video game designer Henk Rogers, whom Pajitnov would become close friends with), PC, and Nintendo Famicom in Japan.
On June 6, 2024, the company announced numerous updates, collaborations, and new merchandise for the excited Tetris players. Some of the notable ones are Tetris add-ons in Minecraft that “merges Tetris block-dropping puzzling action with Minecraft’s adventurous dungeon crawling,” according to Tetris’s website, updates on the Tetris app, and collaborations with G FUEL, Supreme, and Rubik’s Cube.
To learn more about the game, visit https://tetris.com.
