It’s so simple. Brightly colored shapes of different sizes lazily drop down into your box or whatever and you have the time they fall to rotate and move them so they fit snugly into the openings below. No problem. Anyone can play it, even if they’ve never played a video game before.
And then it gets faster. And then you realize you’ve been playing it for 7 hours and you’re hungry and tired and slightly dizzy and your hands are cramping and you still can’t stop playing.
Tetris was invented on June 6, 1984, by Russian mathematician Alexey Pajitnov as a hobby away from his actual field, which was artificial intelligence. Which just makes me suspicious, of course. Was this the first step towards AI? Was my computer somehow learning me through my block choices? Was I being subtly manipulated, maybe with harder games thrown at me on key dates, making me frustrated and irritable for a job interview or security briefing? Or throwing me easy games, making me smug and overconfident and possibly a little bit lax?
I’ve never actually had any sort of security position, but I think the principle is sound. Either way, I wasted a lot of time playing this damn game. So did a lot of people.
It’s the second most popular video game of all time, selling over 70 million copies. 25 years later, it’s still everywhere. It’s available on just aboutĀ every PC and video game platform there is, and also on mobile phones, PDAs, graphical calculators, even hidden on electronic devices that aren’t meant to have games on them, like oscilloscopes.
From a Russian guy who was working on artificial intelligence.
I’m just sayin’. Don’t blame me when our new tetrominoid overlords rise up and take over to the strains of tinny Russian folk music.