"Happy B'day Tetris "

Today when I opened Google.co.in; instead of the usual Google image I saw something resembling my old hand video game. Ya! Its 25th B'day of the famous video game Tetris.


"Tetris" was designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov on June 6, 1984 while he was working in Academy of science of USSR. The name has been derived from a Greek numeral prefix "tetra"—as all of the game's pieces (known as Tetrominoes) contain four segments—and "tennis", Pajitnov's favorite sport. It was created on
Electonika 60 and later ported to IBM PC.

Screenshot of the 1986 IBM PC version

Spectrum Holobyte was the one to get the rights for the game and released the IBM PC version of Tetris in US in 1986. The game's popularity was tremendous, and many players were instantly hooked—it was a software blockbuster with reviews such as in Computer Gaming World calling the game "deceptively simple and insidiously addictive". For Amiga and Atari ST, two different versions by Spectrum HoloByte and Mirrorsoft became available. The Mirrorsoft version did not feature any background graphics while the Holobyte version had a background picture related to Russian themes for each level.

By 1989, half a dozen different companies claimed rights to create and distribute the Tetris software for home computers, game consoles, and handheld systems. Elorg, meanwhile, held that none of the companies were legally entitled to produce an arcade version, and signed those rights over to Atari Games, while it signed non- Japanese console and handheld rights over to Nintendo. Nintendo released their version of Tetris for both the NES and the Game Boy and sold more than three million copies; some players considered Nintendo's NES version inferior because it lacked the side-by-side simultaneous play of Tengen's version, but Nintendo's Game Boy Tetris became arguably the most well-known version of Tetris, selling over 33 million copies. Later in 1996, The Tetris Company (TTC) was formed reverting all the rights of the game from Russian state to Pajitnov himself.

Presently there are many variant of this game for different platform; from Nokia to Chinese handheld video games or Apples 5th generation ipods and various genome based Linux distros have Tetris bundled with them.

A 5th generation iPod featuring Tetris

As we all know about the game play; question arise "would it be possible to play forever ?". The conclusion reached was that a player is inevitably doomed to lose. The reason has to do with the S and Z tetrominoes. If a player receives a large sequence of S tetrominoes, the naïve gravity used by the standard game eventually forces the player to leave a hole in a corner. Thus game ends....