When contemplating the most enduring video games of all time, one game will almost certainly come to mind: Tetris. Indeed, if you grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s and played video games, we don’t think it’s possible that you didn’t play Tetris. Simple yet genius, Tetris has sucked in players of all ages for decades — indeed, it’s one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time, with over 70 million physical copies sold as of December 2011 (the last time this data was collected as of 2021), and at least 500 million mobile app downloads according to Tetris’ website.
Tetris was developed in the 1980s by Alexey Pajitnov in the Soviet Union. Pajitnov was a speech recognition researcher at the Computer Center of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and while he was supposed to be testing the capabilities of new hardware, what he really wanted to be doing was make people happy. He developed several different puzzle games for the center’s computer, the Electronicka 60 — one of those games was Tetris.
One of Pajitnov’s favorite childhood games was one featuring pentominoes. Pentominoes are plane geometric figures formed by joining one or more equal squares edge to edge using five squares each, for a total of 12 shapes. Pajitnov felt 12 shapes was too many for his game of random descending shapes used to fill up rows, and scaled the number of shapes back to seven tetrominoes, which are made of four squares each. He came up with the name Tetris by combining the word “tetra” (meaning four, for the four squares in each tetromino) and “tennis,” his favorite sport. He soon presented his rudimentary version of the game to his colleagues, who quickly became addicted, and within a few weeks it reached every Moscow institute with a computer.
Pajitnov wanted to export his game for others to enjoy, but wasn’t sure how to go about it since the Soviet Union didn’t have intellectual property rights and didn’t allow researchers to sell their creations. If Pajitnov hadn’t been persistent, that might’ve been the end of Tetris, but lucky for the rest of us, he pushed on, asking his supervisor for help. Now this is where things start to get a little complicated with rights being sold when they shouldn’t have been, and Pajitnov making no money on his own creation for many years (though he claimed he was just happy it made others happy). Eventually he got the rights back and moved to America, but in the meantime the game had been sold all over the world thanks to deals with Spectrum HoloByte, Atari and, of course, Nintendo.
Tetris took off like wildfire in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, in no small part thanks to its deal with Nintendo. Nintendo released its Game Boy in 1989, and bundled in the Tetris game with those first units in North America and Europe. Game Boy bundles sold 2 million units, and the NES version of the game also sold 1.5 million copies in just the first six months of release in 1990. Nintendo’s versions of Tetris went on to sell a total of 35 million copies for the Game Boy, and 8 million for the NES.
These days, you don’t have to own a separate gaming console to play Tetris — all you need is your smartphone and an official mobile app, and you’re ready to go. Or heck, if you don’t have a smartphone, all you really need is a computer, as you can play for free on the Tetris website as well. Just don’t start playing if you have something you need to get done — the game is seriously addictive thanks to the sense of accomplishment you get with each level of increasing difficulty you pass.
When did you first play Tetris? How many levels can you complete? Let us know in the comments!
- Playing Tetris can help treat older adolescents with amblyopia (lazy eye) better than the traditional patching of the healthy eye to train the weaker eye, according to a 2013 Canadian study.
- Broderbund was approached with the rights to Tetris in 1987, but they said they didn’t think a Soviet game would ever have a chance at selling in the Western world. Interestingly, the first version of the game for computers sold in the US actually really embraced the Soviet origins of the game — it was sold in a red box with Cyrillic text.
- Tetris holds the Guinness World Record for the most ported video game in history, having appeared on over 65 different platforms.
- Though the earliest versions of Tetris had no music, the most famous Tetris theme music is “Korobeiniki.” The original version of the song is a Russian folk song from the 1800s, but it was arranged by Hirokazu Tanaka for the Nintendo Game Boy and has been going strong as the Tetris theme song ever since.
- If you played amazingly, could you keep playing Tetris forever? It depends on which version of the game you have. Prior to 2001, all blocks were randomized, and eventually you could get a run of S and Z pieces that would make it impossible to keep going. Since 2001, though, the game uses a bag-style randomizer making sure you never receive too many of those pieces in a row. Still, you’d need to be playing a version with the hold feature and 3 piece previews in order to keep going indefinitely. And even then, you probably have to follow a pretty boring, repetitive, method, so what’s the point, really?
- Playing Tetris can help treat older adolescents with amblyopia (lazy eye) better than the traditional patching of the healthy eye to train the weaker eye, according to a 2013 Canadian study.
- Broderbund was approached with the rights to Tetris in 1987, but they said they didn’t think a Soviet game would ever have a chance at selling in the Western world. Interestingly, the first version of the game for computers sold in the US actually really embraced the Soviet origins of the game — it was sold in a red box with Cyrillic text.
- Tetris holds the Guinness World Record for the most ported video game in history, having appeared on over 65 different platforms.
- Though the earliest versions of Tetris had no music, the most famous Tetris theme music is “Korobeiniki.” The original version of the song is a Russian folk song from the 1800s, but it was arranged by Hirokazu Tanaka for the Nintendo Game Boy and has been going strong as the Tetris theme song ever since.
- If you played amazingly, could you keep playing Tetris forever? It depends on which version of the game you have. Prior to 2001, all blocks were randomized, and eventually you could get a run of S and Z pieces that would make it impossible to keep going. Since 2001, though, the game uses a bag-style randomizer making sure you never receive too many of those pieces in a row. Still, you’d need to be playing a version with the hold feature and 3 piece previews in order to keep going indefinitely. And even then, you probably have to follow a pretty boring, repetitive, method, so what’s the point, really?
