Sometimes I indulge in a few reminiscences of the games we old geezers played way back in the last millennium. This time it is: Tetris!
Tetris was created back in 1985, but if you type in Tetris in the search engine of your choice, you will find several sites “play Tetris for free” (although likely copyright-infringing). That is because Tetris is probably the best known game of the world! (There are rumors that small children exist that don’t know it, but I could not verify that.)
Invention
Tetris was based on the table games of Pentomino. But the creator Alexey Pajitnov probably thought 5 (penta) parts per block were too much possibilites for a computer game (or too big for the RAM, who knows ^^) so he reduced it to four (tetra) and named it Tetris, creating a whole genre. Here is a screen of the very first version:
For some time the creator did not make any money from his game, but when the rights reverted to him in 1996, he created a firm (The Tetris Company) and started to sue the web. He likely made some heavy money from licensing by now.
But the game most of us know as “Tetris” is the grey-scale one Nintendo shipped together with the Game Boy. An unmeasurable amount of clones have followed.
How to play
In the case you have never heard of Tetris: Here is how you play it.
You have several different pieces that fall “randomly” from the center top of the screen. You have to arrange it so that you build horizontal full lines with those pieces. If you do that, a row disappears, bonus points for more then one row at the same time.
The game principle is very simple and therefore addictive. It can also make you cry like the time when you build a complete tower 20 rows high and need only the 4-line-piece. Then, to not reach the top of the field and lose the game, you use another piece, blocking the downwards way. THEN invariably the 4-line-piece you waited ages for appears - and is now useless.
Those where the times when gaming experience was build on BIG things ;)
You can still play Tetris or a Tetris clone on every device you have a screen that is big enough.
Did you play Tetris? On which device?