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Tetris is a puzzle game invented by Alexey Pajitnov (last name sometimes spelled Pazhitnov) in 1985, while he was working for the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, Russia. Pajitnov has cited pentominoes as a source of inspiration for the game.
The game (or one of its many variants) is available for nearly every video game console and computer operating system, as well as on devices such as graphing calculators and mobile phones and PDAs. Tetris even appeared as part of an art exhibition on the side of a building [1]. The game first gained mainstream exposure and popularity in 1989 when it was packaged with the original release of Nintendo's Game Boy. It was also released for the computer, but did not gain such popularity on it. Tetris consistently appears on lists of the greatest video games of all time. While the original Game Boy version is currently number two on the best selling games list, Tetris is believed to be the best selling game ever due to its ports onto almost every system ever made.
The game
Tetrominoes or tetrads, shapes composed of four blocks each, fall down a well and the player has to rotate and/or move them with the aim of creating a horizontal line of blocks with no gaps. When such a line is created, it disappears, and the pieces above (if any) fall.
The seven possible pieces used in Tetris are referred to as I, T, O, L, J, S, and Z. All are capable of single and double clears, I, L, and J are able to clear triples, and only the I has the capacity for the four simultaneous clears that is known as a "tetris". (This may vary depending on the rotation and compensation rules of each specific Tetris implementation; For instance, in the "Tetris Worlds" rules currently used in many implementations, certain situations allow "T," "S" and "Z" to 'snap' into tight spots, clearing triples.)
The seven possible Tetris pieces, I, T, O, L, J, S, Z.
Gravity
Original algorithm.
When a row of blocks is cleared and removed, the stacks of blocks above it fall. Many versions of Tetris simply move blocks down by a distance exactly equal to the height of the cleared rows below them. This results in behavior unlike real-world gravity, in that blocks may be left "floating in mid-air". Many feel that this behavior, called "naïve gravity", contributes to the gameplay rather than detracting from it.
Some newer variants implement a different algorithm that uses a flood fill to segment the playfield into connected regions and then makes each region fall individually, in parallel, until it touches the region at the bottom of the playfield. This opens up additional "chain-reaction" tactics involving blocks falling to fill additional lines, which those games tend to reward with a higher score.
Algorithm with chain reactions.
History and legal issues
Tetris has been embroiled in a strangely large number of legal battles since its inception. In June 1985, Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris on an Electronica 60 while working for the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He created it at their Computer Center, and Vadim Gerasimov ported it to the IBM PC.
From there, the game exploded into popularity, and began spreading all around Moscow. (This version was available on Vadim Gerasimov's web site at http://vadim.www.media.mit.edu/Tetris.htm, but the Tetris Company used the DMCA to force Gerasimov to remove it.)
The IBM PC version eventually made its way to Budapest, Hungary, where it was ported to various platforms and was "discovered" by a British software house named Andromeda. They attempted to contact Pajitnov to secure the rights for the PC version, but before the deal was firmly settled, they had already sold the rights to Spectrum Holobyte. After failing to settle the deal with Pajitnov, Andromeda attempted to license it from the Hungarian programmers instead.
Meanwhile, before any legal rights were settled, the Spectrum HoloByte IBM PC version of Tetris was released in the United States in 1986. The game's popularity was tremendous, and many players were instantly hooked—it was a software blockbuster.
The details of the licensing issues were uncertain by this point, but in 1987 Andromeda managed to obtain copyright licensing for the IBM PC version and any other home computer system.
By 1988, the Soviet government began to market the rights to Tetris through an organization called Elektronorgtechnica, or "Elorg" for short. By this time Elorg and Pajitnov had still seen no money from Andromeda, and yet Andromeda was licensing and sub-licensing rights that they themselves didn't even have.
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 promptly signed those rights over to Atari Games, while it signed console and handheld rights over to Nintendo.
Tengen (the console software division of Atari Games), regardless, applied for copyright for their tetramino game for the Nintendo Entertainment System, loosely based on the arcade version, and proceeded to market and distribute it under the name TETЯIS (with faux Cyrillic typography incorporating the Cyrillic letter Ya), disrespecting both Nintendo's and Elorg's rights to the name. Many people think that the Tengen version is a more playable port than the Nintendo version.
After only a few (very popular) months on the shelf, the courts ruled that Nintendo had the rights to Tetris on home game systems, and Tengen's TETЯIS game was recalled, having sold only about 50,000 copies.
Nintendo released their version of Tetris for both the Famicom and the Game Boy (oddly though, the Game Boy version was developed by Bullet-Proof Software, Inc., despite Nintendo's license to the game) and sold more than three million copies; most 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. The lawsuits between Tengen and Nintendo over the Famicom/NES version carried on until 1993.
Pajitnov himself made very little money from the deal, however, even though Nintendo was able to profit from the game handsomely.
In 1996, he and Henk Rogers formed The Tetris Company LLC and Blue Planet Software in an effort to get royalties from the Tetris brand, with good success on game consoles but very little on the PC front. Tetris is a registered trademark of The Tetris Company LLC ("TTC"). TTC has licensed the Tetris mark to a number of companies, but the legality of tetramino games that do not use the Tetris name has not been decided in court.
According to circulars available from the United States Library of Congress, a game cannot be copyrighted (only patented), which refutes much of TTC's copyright claims on the game, leaving the trademark on Tetris as TTC's most significant claim on any government-granted monopoly.
TTC no longer seems to pursue "clones" of the game under such names as:
that do not appear confusingly similar to Tetris.
Is it possible to play forever?
Normally, players lose because:
- they can no longer keep up with the increasing speed, or
- a specific implementation of the game with not very responsive control fails to keep up with itself when the pieces' downward velocity exceeds the maximum lateral velocity the player can apply to a piece. In other words, the possibilities for piece movement are limited [at higher speeds] to the shape of a cone in the game arena. (Avid players consider this situation a design flaw, however, this is the inherent challenge in the game. Altering this aspect, such as by assigning numerical placements, would change the dynamics of the game approach.)
But what if the speed did not increase? Would it be possible to play forever? An article has been published that addresses this issue, and it turns out that in theory, you are doomed to lose eventually.
The problem is the S- and Z-shaped pieces. Suppose you got a large sequence of S-shaped pieces. Eventually, many implementations' approximation of gravity (see above) forces the player to leave a hole in a corner.
Suppose you then get a large sequence of identical Z-shaped pieces. Eventually, you'll be forced to leave a hole in the opposite corner, without clearing your previous hole. Now, things go back to the original orientation for a while and so on until the pieces stack up to the top. Since the pieces are distributed randomly, this sequence will eventually occur. So, if you play long enough, and your random number generator is theoretically perfect, you will lose the game. (See also a more detailed discussion of this issue at http://www2.math.uic.edu/~burgiel/Tetris/, along with an implementation written in Java that has been modified to deal only S- and Z-shaped pieces.)
Practically, this does not occur because the pseudorandom number generator in most implementations, which is usually a linear congruential generator, does not deal such a sequence.
Even on an implementation with a theoretically perfect random number generator (for example, based on hashing Brownian motion) and with naïve gravity, a good player can survive over 150 consecutive pieces that are all S-shaped or Z-shaped; the probability at any given time of the next 150 pieces being only S- and Z-shaped pieces equals one in (7/2)150 (approximately one in 4 × 1081). This number has the same order of magnitude as the number of atoms in the known universe.[2]
Several of the subproblems of Tetris have been shown to be NP-complete on a playing field of size n.
Scoring formula
The scoring formula for the majority of implementations of Tetris is built on the belief that more difficult line clears should be awarded more points. In Nintendo's implementations on the NES, Game Boy, and SNES, the four possible line clears are as follows:
- Single = (level+1)*40 one line is cleared.
- Double = (level+1)*100 two lines are simultaneously cleared.
- Triple = (level+1)*300 three lines are simultaneously cleared.
- Tetris = (level+1)*1200 four lines are simultaneously cleared.
| Level |
00 |
01 |
02 |
03 |
04 |
05 |
06 |
07 |
08 |
09 |
10 |
| Single |
40 |
80 |
120 |
160 |
200 |
240 |
280 |
320 |
360 |
400 |
440 |
| Double |
100 |
200 |
300 |
400 |
500 |
600 |
700 |
800 |
900 |
1000 |
1100 |
| Triple |
300 |
600 |
900 |
1200 |
1500 |
1800 |
2100 |
2400 |
2700 |
3000 |
3300 |
| Tetris |
1200 |
2400 |
3600 |
4800 |
6000 |
7200 |
8400 |
9600 |
10800 |
12000 |
13200 |
Tetris variants
A number of Tetris variants exist. Some feature alternate rules and pieces, and others have completely different gameplay. A large number of ports exist for different platforms. The most popular online client for Tetris is TetriNET.
See article: Tetris variants
Music
The theme tune used in the Game Boy edition of Tetris has become very widely known. It is a Russian folk tune called "Korobeyniki" or "Korobieniki."
Odd Facts
- Until the Sega Saturn, Tetris never (legally) appeared on a Sega system. This led Sega to further expand the Columns series.
- Tetris JR was hinted at being the last Nintendo Game & Watch game but Nintendo canceled it, fearing that it would kill off Game Boy sales. Years later a Tetris JR would appear as a keychain game.
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