Harmony vs. chaos. Happy birthday, Tetris!
Scientists say the secret to the success of this seemingly simple game is linked to the human mind's deep psychological drive to create order. We can't bring order to the world around us (and sometimes even to our own homes), but we can arrange colorful figures on a monitor in an optimal order. And make everything superfluous—whoosh!—disappear.
On Tetris's birthday, NeMoscow recalled how the spinning colored squares conquered the world.
1. Forty years ago, Soviet programmer Alexey Pajitnov created a color version of Tetris for the IBM PC and distributed it among his colleagues at the Computing Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The idea for the game came to Pajitnov after he bought a Pentomino puzzle set at a store and played with it in his office. Within a year, almost everyone in Moscow and several other major cities with an IBM computer was playing Tetris.
2. Pentominoes, as the name suggests, are made up of five squares. Pajitnov felt this would make the game unnecessarily complicated, so he reduced the number of squares to four, creating tetromino. The name "Tetris" later emerged, a combination of the words "tetromino" and "tennis" (Pajitnov's favorite game).
3. The game's release coincided fortunately with the onset of Perestroika, and soon Tetris began its triumphant march across the globe. The game attracted the interest of prominent video game entrepreneurs Robert Stein and Henk Rogers, resulting in Tetris selling millions of copies—though without generating any significant income for its creator. Of particular interest was the fact that Tetris became the first Soviet video game to achieve widespread popularity in the West.
4. Pajitnov was proud of his creation and called the game "an electronic ambassador for charity." In 1991, with the help of Henk Rogers, he emigrated to the United States, and five years later, he founded The Tetris Company and regained the rights to the game.
5. Tetris gradually acquired cult status. It is recognized as one of the greatest video games of all time by nearly every video game publication worldwide.
In 2023, the American biographical thriller Tetris, directed by Jon S. Baird and written by Noah Pink, was released. It tells the story of the struggle to obtain the rights to distribute a video game.
6. Scientists have discovered the "Tetris effect"—a phenomenon in which people who play the puzzle for long periods begin to see falling blocks in their real lives. Research from the Karolinska Institute and Oxford University showed that car accident victims experienced fewer PTSD symptoms if they played Tetris within six hours of being admitted to the hospital.
7. Pajitnov noted that Tetris is especially attractive to women because it is a creative, constructive game, created at a time when all other games were about destruction:
"You take the chaos of these random fragments and try to build something sensible out of it. Most video games, shooters, are about destruction. And they don't value violence the way we kids do, you know?"