Tetris is a tile match puzzle video game originally designed and created by Alexey Pajitnov of the Soviet Union. Released on June 6, 1984 its name derives from the Greek numerical pre-fix “tetra” and tennis, Pajitnov’s favorite sport. It is among the first entertainment games to be exported from the USSR to United States having been published by Spectrum HoloByte for Commodore 64 and IMB PC consoles. Presently Tetris is available for almost every computer game console, computer operating system, all major mobile phones, portable media players, PDA’s, and network music players all over the world. There are even Tetris serving dishes and the game has been played on many side buildings in cities all over the world.
Beginning in the 1980’s Tetris was sold for personal use on a wide range of home computer platforms and public arcades. It became hugely successful when it was sold for Game Boy in 1989 being established as one of the most popular games ever made. Electronic Gaming Monthly named Tetris the “Greatest Game of All Time”.
The game play is as follows, geometric shaped game pieces known as tetriminos (composed of square blocks each) fall down an empty background , the object of the game is for the player to move each piece in 90 degree motions creating a straight line on the bottom of the screen with no gaps. After a certain number of lines have been cleared you move on to the next level. As you move higher and higher each level becomes increasingly harder and the tetrominoes cascade down much faster.
In 2007 Tetris came in second place on IGN’s ‘100 Greatest Video of All Time”. In January 2010 it was announced that Tetris had sold over 170 million copies of which 70 million were physical and over 100 million were for cell phones making it the highest paid downloaded game of all time.
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Image Via: http: commodore.ca
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