Considering the estimable impact and pioneering influence the surprisingly simple and intuitive yet habit-forming diversion Tetris had on the video game landscape, it seems ironic that the concept and programming, built in turn off of earlier mathematical models and gaming traditions that go back to antiquity, Connect-Four or Penta (that glass bead game with the scroll for the playing area that they sold at Pier One), emerged not from the US or Japan but rather the Moscow Academy of Computer Sciences in 1984, spreading to Western markets prior to glasnost and faster than conventional diplomacy in just a matter of months. Did you know that tetrominoes fall in accordance with the laws of gravity, accelerating in proportion to the height of the stacks below?
The game does not speed up only due to advancing levels—it’s kind of an unsettling surprise, like not learning about the secret levels of
Super Mario Brothers until years afterwards or that (supposedly)
Duck Hunt is really a two-player game. Back when the notions of licensing, clones and copycatting were mostly unexplored and untried and there was not a sufficient language to articulate intellectual property, surely the author did not know what he was releasing and signing-away. The game is now ubiquitous, with variants and inspired plays, integrated into the standard quiver of distractions for telephones, key-fobs, greeting cards—but it is strange to think how technology might have been less ingratiating or progress hindered without the earlier platforms of Nintendo Game Boys and the like (because by 1989 many competitors also held distribution rights to different versions of Tetris for play on personal computers and home gaming systems, Nintendo developed a new hand-held console to get around rights issues), propelled to a large extent by that basic game and its catchy tune of the Russia folk song
Korobeiniki (Коробейники).
