By: Travis Gayle (tgayle)
I played three games this week. The first one was Tetris, the second one was Super Mario Bros., and the third was Pac Man. All three games take me back to my childhood because these were some of the only games I had growing up. I’d even play these in the early 2000s because when systems like the PS2 or Nintendo 64 were out, my parents couldn’t afford to buy me the hottest games of the time. In this blog, I will choose to focus a little bit on the history of Tetris as well as the relationship it has to modern games.
Tetris first came about in June of 1984 as a tile puzzle game. It was designed by Alexey Pajitnov, a 29 year old engineering. He created it in a building called called the Soviet Academy of Sciences. It was the first entertainment software adapted by the U.S. from the Soviets. The game was not created by accident, but Pajtinov hid this from his superiors initially. Instead, they thought he was working on bugs. A 16 year old programmer helped Alexey finish the game, but Alexey does admit being addicted when he started playing it.
It became so popular that it became present on almost every console. It was released for the GameBoy in 1989, and there have been many variations and themes since inception. It was so memorable to me just because memory is just what the nature of puzzles happens to be. The lesson I took away from Tetris was just to strategize and think ahead a little bit. Relative to modern games, Tetris is decent. Some of today’s games are not as fun because of how easy it is for people to cheat, but Tetris was one of those games people really couldn’t cheat in.
I played a round of Tetris and took a screenshot that can be seen below. Additionally, I have a screen shot of the original Tetris that Alexey Pajtinov created. As you can see, the concept of the game remains the same, but through the decades there has been a different visual appeal to it.
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