* Crossposted in MIN_CHAT

Hello, All.

This has nothing to do with BBSing, but for people my age, this is a
reminder of what was...

From:
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1902950,00.html?iid=tsmodule

===Cut===
Friday, Jun. 05, 2009
25 Years of Tetris: From Russia With Fun!
By Scott Olstad

Sputnik burned up in the atmosphere, Berlin is now one city, but 25 years
later, the Soviet-designed Tetris remains one of the most popular and
ubiquitous video games ever created. It has sold over 125 million copies,
been released for nearly every video-game platform of the past two decades
and even been played on the side of a skyscraper. Yet creator Alexey
Pajitnov almost never saw a ruble for his creation.

While studying at the Soviet Union's Academy of Science in 1984, the
29-year-old Pajitnov designed a bare-bones version of the game in his free
time for the Elektronika 60, a Soviet terminal computer. The original
version, launched on June 6, 1984, was only 10 levels long because that was
all the Elektronika's memory could handle. Inspired by the classic riddles
and puzzles Pajitnov loved as a child, the game was so addictive he
couldn't even stop playing long enough to finish programming it. "The
program wasn't complicated," he told the Guardian. "There was no
scoring, no levels. But I started playing and I couldn't stop." The
game became known as Tetris, a combination of the Greek prefix tetra and
Pajitnov's favorite sport, tennis. (See the top ten E3 2009 Announcements.)

The premise is simple: as variously shaped groups of four blocks fall down
the screen (trivia answer: they're called "tetrominoes"), a
player must fit them together like a jigsaw. When a horizontal line is
completed, it disappears, freeing up more space to play the game. Once the
stacked blocks reach the top of the screen you're toast. But there's
something about the formula that sets a hook deep in our psyche; players
have even reported seeing the falling blocks in their sleep. "I
believe there is some basic psychological pleasure sensor that Tetris has
found that other [games]don't," said Henk Rogers, the Dutch video-game
designer who secured the console and handheld licensing rights for Nintendo
in 1989, in a recent interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. "The
balance is so good, it feels like you can always go a little more."

That same year Nintendo bundled a copy of Tetris with every unit of their
latest platform, the Game Boy (FROM RUSSIA WITH FUN! read the game's
original packaging). The handheld game system and its variations sold more
than 118 million units; Tetris, generally believed to have played a large
role in the pioneering portable's success, sold a staggering 35 million
units for the Game Boy alone. But despite his creation's record-breaking
popularity, Pajitnov continued to receive his normal salary while the
Kremlin claimed millions in royalties.

Pajitnov moved to the U.S. in 1991 and finally began earning money from his
creation after the rights reverted back to him in 1996. He and Rogers, who
had befriended Pajitnov on his trips to Russia, formed the
straightforwardly titled Tetris Company to manage and license the Tetris
brand, an entity that now spans more than 50 countries. The company
maintains the "Tetris guidelines"-a set of basic standards to
which all officially branded games must adhere. These rules stipulate
everything from the colors of the blocks to a mandatory inclusion of the
game's now famous theme song, the Russian folk tune
"Korobeiniki." Tetris is now ubiquitous: it's the best selling
cell-phone game and one of the top 10 iPhone apps of all time, and has even
inspired wacky Japanese game shows. In 2007, video-game website IGN named
it the second best game of all time, behind only Super Mario Bros. saying,
"It's the puzzle game. Not a puzzle game, THE puzzle game."

Pajitnov continues to design games today-his similarly colorful puzzler
Hexic was packaged with Microsoft's Xbox 360 Premium Bundle at the
console's launch. But Tetris remains his magnum opus. As prices for
video-game development run into the tens of millions of dollars, Tetris'
simple formula still beats them all. "It's awesome when you look at
the industry and everyone spending millions on graphics and music and more
and here we are with Tetris just kicking ass," Rogers told the AFP.
"It is an enviable position."
===Cut===

Later,
Sean

//sean{at}nsbbs.info | http://nsbbs.info | ICQ: 19965647

... History books which contain no lies are extremely dull.
--- GoldED/2 3.0.1