- In Nov. 2012, Tetris was one of 14 video games acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, part of an initiative to develop a new category of artworks within the museum collection, MoMA officials said in a statement.
- In 1993, Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr A. Serebrov spent 196 days on the Mir space station with a very special distraction: a gray Game Boy loaded with Tetris. During that time the game orbited the Earth 3,000 times and became the first video game played in space.
- Thanks to the absurd number of systems it has been ported onto, Tetris is the top-selling game of all time. It isn’t clear how many copies Tetris have sold over the years, but the number is in the hundreds of millions. As of 2014, Tetris had sold over 425 million copies on mobile devices alone.
- Gamefaqs started out as a website that allowed players to upload their own guides for video games. As time went on, the Gamefaqs forum grew larger and larger, until it eclipsed the original purpose of the site. In 2002, Gamefaqs started holding regular popularity contests for video games and their characters. These tend to be contentious, with accusations of cheating being a common fixture of each competition. The most recent of these contents was the Best Game Ever award of 2015, which was won by Undertale.
- Tetris is a favorite game among mathematicians, inspiring academic papers from fans. One particularly fascinating examination comes from Heidi Burgiel, a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In her paper “How to Lose at Tetris,” Burgiel sought out to examine what qualifications are necessary to make an unbeatable Tetris game. Her study showed, mathematically, that a game featuring only alternating “z” and “s” pieces will always end before 69,600 tetrominoes have been played. However, while all Tetris games must theoretically end, according to her study, in a typical game if everything is played perfectly, the game must end after 127,200 z-tetrominoes of alternating orientations. You can read Burgiel’s paper here.
- Playing Tetris thickens the brain's cortex and can contribute to greater cognitive efficiency, according to a study published in Sept. 2009 in the journal BMC Research Notes.
- A group of 26 teenage girls were tasked with playing Tetris for 30 minutes each day over three months. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs) of their brains taken before and after the three-month period showed thickening in three brain regions — one in the left frontal lobe and two in the left temporal lobe — while there were no changes in the brains of girls who did not play Tetris.
- Tetrisphere for the Nintendo 64 was an attempt at bringing Tetris to a rounder world. The player had to destroy blocks that formed a sphere, in order to reveal what was inside. It was certainly an interesting take on the idea of Tetris.
- The only thing more addictive than Tetris’ gameplay is its theme tune. It might be the most universally recognised piece of video game music of all time. The Tetris theme is a Russian folk song, called “Korobeiniki”. This song dates back 1861, meaning that it has long been in the public domain (which is likely one of the reasons it was chosen for the game). Korobeiniki is a song about a peddler, who offers his goods to a girl in order to win her heart.
- The unusual name "Tetris" was coined by its inventor,He got the idea for the shapes of the playing pieces from a popular puzzle game called "pentonimos," in which each piece was made up of five equal squares
- The Matrix is made up of a 10-by-20 grid
- It was the game you played so obsessively that perhaps you remember seeing the falling shapes in your sleep.
- The creator of Tetris is a man named Alexey Pajitnov. He designed the game whilst working for the Academy of Science of the USSR. The idea for Tetris came about while Pajitnov was working on designing artificial intelligence for the Soviet Union. It took him less than two weeks to create the game. When Tetris proved popular with his colleagues, plans were made for the game to make its way to the public.
- Tetris is one of the most financially successful video game series of all time… or at least it is for everyone except Alexey Pajitnov. The Soviet Union took all of the money for Tetris, leaving nothing for the game’s creator. It took the end of communism in Russia for Pajitnov to finally earn some cash for his creation. In 1996, the rights to Tetris finally returned to Pajitnov. He was able to create the Tetris Company, which now owns the full licencing rights to the game. It took over a decade of waiting (and the fall of the Iron Curtain) for Pajitnov to receive recognition and compensation for his landmark video game.
- There have been many attempts at turning video games into movies and they have mostly been awful. The best they can hope for is a “so bad it’s good” reputation, that might earn it a cult following (like Street Fighter). Film companies still keep trying, however. It seems that no amount of negative reviews for Assassin’s Creed will deter them. You would think that Tetris would be the last video game that could be turned into a movie. The story of how Tetris was made might make an interesting film, with the tale of Alexey Pajitnov’s struggle to get his money, or the rights issues surrounding the game.
You can play Tetris online
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