Tetris is 30 years old!
Tetris turned 30 years old today. Have you played it? Tetris was one of the first games I played, and I still love it!
Here's a snippet of the interview with Pajitnov on TIME about Tetris:
As one of the most popular puzzle video games in the world celebrates its 30th anniversary, we speak with the man who created it and the man who helped sell it to the world.
Thirty years ago today, a little game about dropping geometrically strange thingamajigs — originally clusters of punctuation marks — into neat, lookalike rows kicked off on a wild journey that led it (and it’s Russian creator, Alexey Pajitnov) out of a metamorphosing Soviet Union to the United States, and from “blockbuster” sales of 2 million already by 1988 to over 425 million paid mobile downloads today.
That game, dubbed Tetris by Pajitnov after the Greek word for the number four, is today one of the most popular video games of all time. It’s played by celebrities, been name-checked by shows like The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory, appeared (in playable form) on the sides of skyscrapers, found its way into dozens of scientific studies (including one that determined playing the game reduces cravings for food, booze and cigarettes) and appears in New York City’s Museum of Modern Art — a permanent addition to the museum’s exhibit on Applied Design.
Do you feel like playing a classic game of Tetris? Head over to Tetris and Friends, and play the 1989 mono version.
