Tetris (electronic game)

Tetris is a classic video game that became wildly popular in the 1980s and eventually grew into one of the video game industry’s most well-known and valuable franchises. Developed by Russian software engineer Alexey Pajitnov in 1984, the original Tetris was a simple puzzle game that required players to manipulate and align a series of falling geometric shapes to create lines before the playing field is filled. After making its American debut on the Commodore 64 and IBM PC platforms, numerous console versions of Tetris produced by video game companies like Atari and Nintendo began to appear. The most impactful iteration of the game, however, was the version of Tetris that Nintendo released in conjunction with its handheld Game Boy system in 1989. Packaged with every new Game Boy sold, Tetris quickly became one of the most widely played video games in history. Since that time, Tetris has retained its place as perhaps the world’s most recognizable video game.

Background

Tetris is a puzzle game that revolves around the manipulation of game pieces called Tetriminos. Tetriminos are based on tetrominoes, which are geometric shapes made up of four square blocks each. Each of the game’s seven unique Tetriminos has a different geometric shape, including one that forms a square and one that forms a straight line. During gameplay, Tetriminos fall one at time from the top of the playing field to the bottom. In Tetris terminology, the playing field is known as the Matrix. As a Tetrimino falls through the Matrix, the player has the ability to manipulate it in two different ways. First, the player can move the Tetrimino horizontally across the Matrix as he or she deems necessary. The player can also rotate the Tetrimino by quarter-turns so as to alter its geometric orientation.

The object of Tetris is ultimately to prevent the Tetriminos from piling up to the top of the Matrix. To do this, the player must manipulate the Tetriminos as they fall so he or she can fit them together when they reach the bottom. When the player completes a full horizontal line, that line disappears and any filled squares above it move down. Over the course of the game, the Matrix gradually fills as the player works to complete horizontal lines. The game ends when stacked incomplete lines eventually reach the top of the Matrix.

The challenge of Tetris is multifaceted. The most basic challenge is that the various Tetriminos fall in random order. Although most versions of Tetris feature a preview box that shows the player what the next Tetrimino will be, they do not appear in any set order. As a result, the player is prevented from effectively planning more than one move ahead. In addition, the speed at which the Tetriminos fall increases as the player progresses through each of the game’s levels. This naturally reduces the amount of time the player has to manipulate each Tetrimino before it reaches the bottom. The player earns points for each completed line until the game inevitably concludes when uncompleted lines reach the top of the Matrix.

Overview

Tetris was the brainchild of Russian software engineer Alexey Pajitnov. In the 1980s, Pajitnov worked at a government-run research and development facility in Moscow called the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Sometime in 1984, he began developing his own computer game on the side for fun. The game he created was based on a traditional puzzle game known as pentominoes. In pentominoes, wooden shapes made up of five equal squares are put together in a box. Pajitnov essentially created an electronic version of pentominoes in which the player has to assemble geometric shapes as they fall to the bottom of an open space. He dubbed his game “Tetris,” a name that referenced both “tetra,” the Greek prefix for “four,” and tennis, which was his favorite sport.

After completing the first version of Tetris, Pajitnov shared it with his co-workers. Enthralled with the game, Pajitnov’s co-workers began making copies of Tetris and sharing it with their friends. Before long, Tetris became popular across Moscow and throughout the Soviet Union. Eventually, a copy of the game reached the Hungarian Institute of Technology. It was there that Robert Stein, owner of Andromeda Software, encountered Tetris for the first time. Stein sought out Pajitnov in hopes of licensing the game, but by then the rights to Tetris were owned by a new government agency called Elektronorgtechnica (Elorg) that was tasked with overseeing all foreign distribution of Soviet-produced software. Initially, Elorg licensed the rights to Tetris specifically for distribution on personal computers. However, Stein told British distributor Mirrorsoft that he would also soon acquire the rights to distribute the game via coin-operated arcade machines, home-gaming consoles, and handheld devices. In turn, Mirrorsoft agreed to licensing deals in Japan with video game giants Atari and Sega. Around the same time, a company called BulletProof Software acquired the rights to distribute Tetris in Japan on computers and consoles for Nintendo. However, none of these deals was authorized by Elorg, which eventually caused a problem. After sorting everything out, Elorg decided to grant the arcade rights to Tetris to Atari and the console and handheld rights to Nintendo. Still, the legal drama surrounding Tetris’ distribution continued. Atari subsidiary Tengen ignored Elorg’s decision and started distributing Tetris for its parent company’s consoles anyway. This ultimately led to a lawsuit between Atari and Nintendo that resulted in the latter winning the exclusive rights to distribute Tetris on home consoles.

Although immediately popular with gamers, Tetris’s major breakthrough came when Nintendo started packaging copies of the game with its new Game Boy handheld video game systems in 1988. Once paired with the Game Boy, Tetris became one of the most well-known and widely played video games in the world. Since then, Tetris has been released on more than fifty platforms and sold in excess of 170 million copies worldwide. The game’s popularity has also led to the creation of numerous sequels and spinoffs, including Welltris (1989), Tetris 2 (1993), Tetris Attack (1996), Tetris 64 (1998), and Tetris 99 (2019).

Bibliography

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