TETRISOPEDIA

How Tetris conquered the world, block by block

2010-08-20T03:58:00.000-07:00

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.

But not numerical ones. He ended up creating one that would infest the dreams of those who played it, spurring addictions and even the suspicion that it was a Russian plot to divert the youth of America in a pointless exercise.

"I started to put together all kinds of mathematical puzzles and diversions that I had loved all my life, since I was a boy," says Alexey Pajitnov, talking to the Guardian from the Russian capital.

Pajitnov, then 29, thought the puzzles were fun, but after a few experiments there was one roughly-hewn game that stood out from the others.

"The program wasn't complicated," he says. "There was no scoring, no levels. But I started playing and I couldn't stop. That was it."

Russia is used to revolutions, but this was something different: Tetris had been born.

The concept is simple: from the top of the screen a series of differently-shaped "blocks" fall slowly towards the bottom. The player can turn each block as it falls – making a line into a column, say – or move it sideways, but once it hits the lowest point, it stays. If the blocks fill a line without gaps, they disappear. Otherwise they pile up, giving the player less and less time before they hit the "bottom".

Simple; but hugely addictive. A quarter of a century later, it has a legitimate claim to being the videogame that has truly conquered the world. In all its forms, Tetris has sold more than 70m copies around the globe; it has spawned architecture, art and music; it has earned multiple Guinness World Records (including "Longest Prison Sentence for Playing a Video Game", for a man who kept playing it on his mobile phone during a flight against crew demands) and is regularly voted one of the top games of all time.

The game's early success didn't leave Pajitnov much better off – the rights were owned by the Soviet state – but the combination of falling blocks did start to gain some traction. A PC version released in 1985 began spreading around eastern Europe, before heading to the west a couple of years later.

But it was in 1988 that things started to accelerate.

"I first saw it at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January of 1988," says Henk Rogers, a Dutch games publisher who was based in Japan at the time.

He says it didn't take long to realise there was something interesting going on with this deceptive, unpretentious puzzle game.

"My first impression was that this game was too simple, that there was nothing to it. Then I came back and played it again. And again. Soon I realised there was something going on – no game had grabbed me at a show just like that."

Rogers beat fierce competition to agree on a deal – a move that eventually led to an agreement brokered with Nintendo that that saw Tetris bundled with every Game Boy. That, says Pajitnov, is when things changed.

"We visited Nintendo's headquarters … all the cartridges for Tetris on the Game Boy were stored in this Kyoto warehouse," he says. "I saw, in reality, all these hundreds of thousands of pieces of my game. It was at that time I realised it wasn't just a small game, it was a big, big material shift. That was a very strange feeling."

Without Nintendo it is likely that Tetris would have faded into obscurity, but Rogers – an affable and restless Dutchman – says he found an ally in Minoru Arakawa, then boss of Nintendo of America.

"He's the one I did the big deal with; he totally recognised that this game was the key to Game Boy's success in the rest of the world. He packed in 30m of them."

While Rogers made a career out of licensing Tetris to other companies around the world, Pajitnov had to wait until 1996 – when the rights reverted to him from the Russian state – to begin making money from his success. By that time, however, his mind was elsewhere: he had moved to the US and was working as a games designer at Microsoft.

These days, both men spend their time licensing Tetris to other companies. Between them, they maintain the "Tetris guidelines" – a surprisingly exacting basic standard that any official version of the game must meet.

This includes, among other things, the size of the playing area, the colours of the tetronimos, the configuration of keys and buttons used to move the blocks. Also in the rules is the demand that the game must include a version of the Tetris theme song – a folk number called Korobeiniki that has become almost as recognisable as the game itself, even reaching the dizzy heights of number six in the UK charts back in 1992, thanks to a Europop cover version masterminded by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

For anybody with functional hearing, that marks a low point in the history of Tetris – but it didn't stop the game enduring.

But what makes it that way? Of the game's contemporaries, only Nintendo's Italian plumber Mario has shown similar longevity – and even he has changed over the years.

Pajitnov, who says he is still a coder at heart, believes that Tetris is a "good program" with simplicity and portability as crucial assets. But he thinks the secret sauce for its 25-year success is something more pedestrian: perseverance.

"Frankly, I think that most of the classic games which were written in the 80s or early 90s are dead just because their authors or owners didn't care about them," he says. "They're still interesting to people, especially now with the new boom of casual games."

Whether that continuing interest is a symptom or a cause of the game's success remains unclear – but persistence and dedication has certainly proved important, even when it strays into the overbearing (they regularly litigate against unlicensed versions of the game).

Even after so many years – and despite recognising the addictive nature of the game early on – Rogers remains surprised that Tetris has displayed such durability.

"I always thought that every game has a certain shelf life," he says. "In the early PC business it would take somebody else a year to copy your game, so I thought we had a year or two before somebody came up with a better Tetris."

"You know what? They tried. But in 25 years, nobody has."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2009/jun/02/tetris-25anniversary-alexey-pajitnov

The Tetris Story [Epilogue]

2010-06-14T03:15:00.000-07:00

Atari Games still released an arcade version of Tetris, selling about twenty thousand units. Atari Games was recently bought up by Williams/WMS; the fate of the Tengen Tetris carts lying in warehouses is unknown. In all likelihood they were bulldozed since Tengen could not legally get rid of them any other way. If the figures are to be believed, there are about one hundred thousand Tengen Tetris cartridges floating around; a less-than-average run by NES standards, but still nowhere near an impossible cart to find.

Robert Stein made, in total, about $250,000 on Tetris. He could have made a great deal more, of course, but Stein had trouble getting Atari and Mirrorsoft to pay him royalties for the (bogus) rights he sold them. Spectrum Holobyte had to organize another deal with ELORG just to hold on to the computer rights to Tetris.

Robert Maxwell's large-scale media organization collapsed in the midst of the struggle, and Robert Maxwell himself died suspiciously as questions rose about whether he was entirely honest about his business dealings. As a result, Mirrorsoft UK faded away as well.

The big winners of the whole affair were Henk Rogers, president of BPS, and Nintendo themselves. How much did Tetris make for Nintendo? That's difficult to answer, considering that Tetris being the pack-in for the Game Boy enticed customers to buy the Game Boy.. and from there, buy other Game Boy carts. Bringing all this into account, the figure can go up and up and up. About 30 million Game Boy Tetris carts have been made.

As for the Russians, no one made big money from Tetris except for the Soviet government. As the USSR broke up, the people at ELORG and the Academy scattered across the country.

Alexey Pazhitnov made nearly no money from Tetris itself. ELORG made, then cancelled a deal that would have given him merchandising rights to Tetris. Still, Pazhitnov was happy that the game he created became famous world-wide, and he did get an 286-clone from the Academy as a reward; he also had a much nicer apartment than most of his colleagues. In 1996, with the financial backing of Henk Rogers, he organized The Tetris Company LLC, and is now finally getting royalties for his creation.

(http://www.atarihq.com/tsr/special/tetrishist.html)

The Tetris Story [part 3]

2010-05-05T10:47:00.000-07:00

March 31, 1989
Howard Lincoln gleefully faxes Atari Games a cease-and-desist order to stop manufacturing any version of Tetris for the NES. Both Atari and Robert Maxwell become furious. Tengen responds to Nintendo on April 7th that they completely own the rights to home versions of Tetris.

April 13, 1989
Tengen files an application for a copyright of the "audiovisual work, the underlying computer code and the soundtrack" of Tetris for the NES. The application does not mention Alexey Pazhitnov or Nintendo's rights to the game.

Robert Maxwell, meanwhile, is using his vast media empire to try to get Tetris back. He contacts both the Soviet and British governments to intervene on the Tetris matter. Infighting between the Communist party and ELORG begins, and Maxwell gets a promise from no less than Mikhail Gorbachev that he "should no longer worry about the Japanese company".

In late April, Lincoln flies back to Moscow and learns of ELORG's being put upon by the government. In the middle of the night, he receives a call from NOA that Tengen has sued Nintendo.

The next day, he starts interviewing Belikov, Pazhitnov, and many others at ELORG, to make sure that Nintendo's case for the Tetris home rights is airtight. NOA immediately countersues Tengen, and evidence begins to be gathered.

May 17, 1989
Tengen releases their version of Tetris with a full-page ad in USA Today, despite the coming legal battle.

June 1989
The court case between Tengen and Nintendo begins.

The battle mostly hinged on one matter: Was the Nintendo Entertainment System a computer, under the definition in the contract that Belikov made Stein sign, or a video-game system? Atari argued that the NES was meant to be a computer, due to its expansion port and the existence of a computer network for the Famicom (short for "Family Computer") in Japan. Nintendo's argument was more to the point: the Russians at ELORG had never had the intention of selling the video game rights to Tetris; the definition of "computer" in Stein's contract proved it.

June 15, 1989
A hearing is held about the injunctions Tengen and Nintendo had given each other to cease manufacture and sale of their respective versions of Tetris. Judge Fern Smith decides that neither Mirrorsoft nor Spectrum Holobyte had been granted the video game rights, so therefore it could not have legally given those rights to Tengen. Nintendo's injunction request is granted.

June 21, 1989
Tengen's version of Tetris is taken off the shelves, and manufacture of the Tengen version is ceased. Several hundred thousand copies of Tengen Tetris, sitting in their boxes, lie in a warehouse.

July 1989
Nintendo's version of Tetris for the NES is released. About three million are sold in the US. At the same time, the Game Boy, with Tetris as the pack-in, is being sold. America gets Tetrisized.

This ends the main history of Tetris; the lawsuit between Nintendo and Atari would continue to drag on and on and on (it was finally finished up by 1993).

(http://www.atarihq.com/tsr/special/tetrishist.html)

Analogical Tetris.

2010-04-26T02:14:00.000-07:00

Playing the video game 'Tetris' could reduce trauma, claim Oxford University

2010-04-12T09:57:00.000-07:00

Playing the video game "Tetris" after a major shock could reduce the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, claim scientists.

British researchers found that playing the popular computer game shortly after the trauma helped wipe out the bad memories and reduce distressing flashbacks.

The psychologists from Oxford University believe the discovery could lead to new treatments for accident victims in hospitals as well as those involved in war zones.

"This is only a first step in showing that this might be a viable approach to preventing post traumatic stress disorder,' said Dr Emily Holmes of the Department of Psychiatry at Oxford University, who led the work.

"This was a pure science experiment about how the mind works from which we can try to understand the bigger picture.

"There is a lot to be done to translate this experimental science result into a potential treatment.

The researchers who published their findings in the Public Library of Science One journal showed 40 healthy volunteers that included traumatic images of injury from a variety of sources, including adverts highlighting the dangers of drink driving.

After waiting for 30 minutes, 20 of the volunteers played "Tetris" for 10 minutes while the other half did nothing. Those who had played the computer game experienced significantly fewer flashbacks over the next week.

Dr Holmes and her team believe that the computer game helps block the brain from storing painful memories as long as it is played immediately after the event.

This she explains is because the brain is split into two: one section is sensory and the other is analytical.

Because there are limits to our abilities to do two things at once - like hold a conversation while doing a maths problems - the computer game is able to "interfere with the way our memories are retained in the brain".

The Oxford team chose "Tetris" because it involves moving coloured building blocks around and uses a large part of the mind. They are unsure whether other computer games would be as effective.

Dr Holmes said: "Tetris may work by competing for the brain's resources for sensory information. We suggest it specifically interferes with the way sensory memories are laid down in the period after trauma and thus reduces the number of flashbacks that are experienced afterwards."

Co-researcher Dr Catherine Deeprose added: "We know there is a period of up to six hours in which it is possible to affect certain types of memories that are laid down in the human mind.

"We have shown that in healthy volunteers, playing 'Tetris' in this time window can reduce flashback-type memories without wiping out the ability to make sense of the event."

By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent

How Tetris Changes Your Brain

2010-04-05T22:50:00.000-07:00

Playing Tetris actually gives you more brain to work with, says a new study to be published later this week.

The study, funded by Tetris makers and authored by investigators at the Mind Research Network in New Mexico, shows that playing the classic puzzle game had two distinct effects on the brains of research subjects: Some areas in the brain showed greater efficiency (the blue areas in the diagram above), and different areas showed thicker cortexes, which is a sign of more grey matter (red).

This, says the doctors who undertook the study, shows that focusing on a “challenging visuospatial task” like a videogame can actually alter the structure of the brain, not just increase brain activity.

Future benefits of this study, says co-investigator Dr. Richard Haier, might be to “demonstrate that a player of Tetris does see lasting effects that generalize to other activity,” showing for example that engaging in activities like playing some games might help fight off the mental decline that occurs with aging.

The study’s subjects, a group of adolescent girls, underwent MRI scans before and after a three-month Tetris practice period.

The Tetris Story [part 2]

2010-03-24T11:56:00.000-07:00

February 21, 1989

Rogers gets to ELORG representative Evgeni Belikov first. He impresses Alexey Pazhitnov and the Russians, and signs a contract for the handheld rights to Tetris. Afterward, Rogers shows off the Famicom version of Tetris to the Russians. Belikov is shocked. He didn't give Rogers the rights to make a console version! Rogers explains that he got the rights from Tengen; Belikov has never heard of Tengen! Rogers, trying to appease the Russians, tells Belikov the part of the story Stein did not tell him, and writes him a check for royalties on the Tetris cartridges he has already sold, with promises of more checks. He sees that he has a chance to get all the console rights to Tetris, but knows that the much larger Atari will fight him. Fortunately, he has Nintendo on his side!

A reminder: Robert Stein's original agreement was only for computer versions of Tetris. Any other rights he gave out weren't his to sell.

Later, Stein makes it to ELORG. Belikov makes him sign an alteration to the original contract defining computers as "PC computers which consist of a processor, monitor, disk drive(s), keyboard and operation system". Stein misses this line defining computers; he later realizes that it was all a big orchestration on Rogers' part to get his rights from Stein. The next day, he is told that, although he can't get the handheld rights at the moment, he can get the arcade-game rights. He signs the contract for them three days later.

February 22, 1989
Kevin Maxwell visits ELORG. Belikov takes out Rogers' Famicom Tetris cart and asks him about it. Maxwell was unaware that his own company gave some rights to Atari Games until he reads Mirrorsoft's name on the cartridge. Maxwell asserts that the cart is a pirated copy, and returns to his agenda of getting the arcade and handheld Tetris rights. He leaves with only the right to bid on any rights remaining on Tetris.

The final scorecard: Kevin Maxwell walks off with a piece of paper, Robert Stein with the arcade rights, and ELORG with conclusive evidence, thanks to Maxwell's assertion that any Famicom carts are pirates, that it never sold the video game rights. If Maxwell wanted those rights it would have to outbid Nintendo. Henk Rogers has the handheld rights and tells Arakawa at NOA that the console rights are up for grabs. BPS makes a deal to let Nintendo make Tetris for Game Boy; a deal that was ultimately worth between $5 and 10 million to BPS.

March 15, 1989
Henk Rogers returns to Moscow and makes a gigantic offer for the console rights to Tetris on behalf of Nintendo - an offer that, although undisclosed, was high enough that Mirrorsoft did not try to match it. Arakawa and NOA chief executive officer Howard Lincoln fly to the USSR.

March 22, 1989
A contract for the home videogame rights is finalized with Nintendo, which insists on a clause that the Russians would come to America to testify in the legal battle that would undoubtedly ensue after word of the contract comes out. The advance cash for ELORG is reported to be around $3 to 5 million. Belikov wires Mirrorsoft saying that neither it, Andromeda, or Tengen were authorized to distribute Tetris on video game systems, and that those rights are now given to Nintendo. The Nintendo and BPS executives have a party that night in their Moscow hotel room.

(http://www.atarihq.com/tsr/special/tetrishist.html)

Hero of the day.

2010-02-22T13:38:00.000-08:00

We added new view in iTetris - Hero of the day!

TOP 100 & The Best Leagues !

2010-02-19T07:51:00.000-08:00

We added a few things in iTetris:
1. TOP 100 - you can see now more scores

2. The Best Leagues - see if your league is the best!

Enjoy!

New score dialog.

2010-02-17T22:52:00.000-08:00

We added new information to iTetris score dialog. Enjoy!

The Tetris Story [part 1]

2010-02-11T14:41:00.000-08:00

Tetris is one of the few games that achieves ultimate popularity. It is remarkably simple, yet remarkably difficult. It's been ported to every computer and game console known to man, and has sold millions of cartridges, tapes, and disks across the land.

Besides that, it also led to one of the most interesting legal battles in the history of video games, leading to the famed Tengen version of Tetris and to the downfall of a few companies. It's a pretty cool story, so let's get down to business. Hold on for a second while I set the time machine to cruise control..

June 1985
Inspired by a pentominoes game he had bought earlier, Alexey Pazhitnov creates Tetris on an Electronica 60 at the Moscow Academy of Science's Computer Center. It is ported to the IBM PC by Vadim Gerasimov and starts spreading around Moscow. Pazhitnov gets a small degree of fame for his program.

July 1986
The PC version makes its way to Budapest, Hungary, where it is ported to the Apple II and Commodore 64 by Hungarian programmers. These versions catch the eye of Robert Stein, president of the British software house Andromeda. He plans to get the rights to the PC version from Pazhitnov directly, and to get the other versions from the Hungarian programmers. Even before Stein gets in touch with Pazhitnov or the Academy, he sells all the rights to Tetris (except for arcade and handheld versions) to Mirrorsoft UK and its USA affiliate, Spectrum Holobyte, owned by Robert Maxwell's Pergamon Foundation.

November 1986
Stein wires a contract for the rights to Tetris to the Academy. Although Pazhitnov would later say that he did not mean to give a firm go-ahead to the deal, Stein goes ahead and flies to Moscow to sign the contract. He returns empty-handed; the Russians made up for their lack of knowledge of the video game world with obstinance. Stein makes a plan to essentially steal Tetris, to claim it was invented by the Hungarian programmers.

Mirrorsoft Tetris, Atari ST version

Meanwhile, the IBM PC version of Tetris is released by Spectrum Holobyte and Mirrorsoft, causing an instant sensation not only as an obscenely addictive game, but also as "the first game from behind the iron curtain". The game is filled with graphics of Russian themes (battles, Matthias Rust landing his Cessna on Red Square, Yuri Gagarin's first space mission). Stein still does not legally own any rights to Tetris.

June 1987
Stein presses for and finally gets a license giving him the rights to make Tetris for the IBM PC and compatibles "and any other computer system". Now he owns the copyrights to Tetris, but he still doesn't have a contract with the Russians.

January 1988
Tetris is released for all home computers. It gets glowing reviews and sells quickly in computer stores. Stein's plan to "steal" the rights to Tetris is foiled when the CBS Evening News interviews Pazhitnov as the inventor of the game. A new company, ELORG (Electronorgtechinca), takes over the negotiations with Stein.

ELORG's director, Alexander Alexinko, realizes that Stein is giving out rights he doesn't have and threatens to cut off any deal. Stein, in turn, threatens to start an international situation.

May 1988
After months of bickering, Stein signs a contract with ELORG to make Tetris for computers. The contract expressly forbids rights to arcade and handheld versions, and any other mediums "which we did not dream about yet". Meanwhile, Tetris has become the top-selling computer game in England and the United States.

July 1988
Stein meets with Alexinko in Paris to work out arcade rights to Tetris. Alexinko has quite a different agenda; he hasn't seen any money from Stein at all yet. Meanwhile, Spectrum and Mirrorsoft are sub-licensing their rights. Spectrum gives Bullet-Proof Software the rights to make Tetris video and computer games in Japan; at the same time, Mirrorsoft gives Atari Games the exact same rights in Japan and North America. The two companies start infighting.

Robert Maxwell, owner of both Mirrorsoft and Spectrum, sides with Mirrorsoft on the matter. Atari starts plans to release an arcade and NES game (under the Tengen label). Bullet-Proof Software still has the computer rights in Japan; BPS president Henk Rogers successfully gets the rights to release a video-game version later in the year. Tetris is released for the Famicom in early November 1988; eventually, two million cartridges would be sold.

BPS Tetris for Famicom

November 1988
The Game Boy is undergoing development. Nintendo of America head Minoru Arakawa wants to make Tetris the pack-in game; he enlists Henk Rogers to get the handheld rights to Tetris for him. Rogers contacts Stein but basically gets stonewalled by him, so Rogers decides to fly to Moscow to get the rights himself. Stein, sensing why Rogers asked for the rights, flies to Moscow as well. Robert Maxwell's son, Kevin, also decides to fly to Moscow to straighten out what is by now a large-scale licensing mess. The three men fly into Moscow at the exact same time.

(http://www.atarihq.com/tsr/special/tetrishist.html)

Start!

2010-02-08T11:38:00.000-08:00

...,5,4,3,2,1,...start....
and we started!

iTetris is now stable. Play IT.

New beta3 is available!

2010-02-03T02:09:00.000-08:00

Try the latest BETA version!

Countdown!

2010-02-02T10:27:00.000-08:00

In a week time the full version of iTetris.net will be run. See you soon!

Google Celebrates Tetris Birthday

2009-06-06T01:50:00.000-07:00

Today is the 25th birthday of one of the most popular games of all times. While it's seen thousands of reincarnations, the original Tetris game was created June 6th, 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov. There are very few people who haven't played it and it seems Google shares the love as it is celebrating the game's birthday with a custom Tetris-inspired logo on its home page.

“This is a huge honor for all of us at Tetris,” said Henk Rogers, president & CEO of Blue Planet Software, the company that manages the exclusive licensing rights to Tetris. “We are exceedingly grateful to Google for such a meaningful global salute. Both Google and TETRIS share important qualities that bring people around the world together. Both Google and TETRIS transcend culture and fulfill a universal desire for order.”

“This is the best anniversary present,” said Pajitnov, who created the first game of Tetris on June 6, 1984 after two weeks of programming. “Twenty-five years ago, I wrote the program for TETRIS in my spare time. Never in my wildest dreams did I think my love of puzzles would create a game that’s loved by so many millions.”

The game is one of the most popular in the world, having sold over 125 million copies over various platforms and being translated in over 50 languages. There have been over 75 million sold on mobile devices alone.