The Story of Tetris

BBC4 did a good documentary on this a few years ago called "Tetris: From Russia With Love". Recommended if you can find a copy on your preferred streaming/download option.

You may enjoy an interview with the tetris man himself: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzsTvqyBRGv0-uyjDuQD1...

Some of the technological history he mentions is quite interesting.

Henk Rogers now stays in Hawaii and runs an incubator BlueStartups.

I spoke to him at one of his launch parties in Honolulu and he is an amazingly warm guy to speak to. It was a welcome change compared to the VCs here in Australia who sit high on their iron throne and sneer down at startups

The licensing/legality of Tetris clones has always amused me.

Could someone have made a NES Tetris clone and called it 'Block Puzzle', or would Nintendo have never approved it? Obviously the Atari version was called Tetris so they got shutdown (plus Tengen was making unlicensed NES cartridges...)

There aren't even many tetris clones on the iPhone. You've got the 'official' version (thanks, EA) but lawyers have jumped on so many small-time developers.

If reading about Tetris made you want to play it (again), here's a BSD-licensed implementation of a falling-blocks game that might be similar to Tetris: https://github.com/zeromeaner/zeromeaner

(Zeromeaner is a fork of NullpoMino since the latter hasn't been updated for several years.)

Not mentioned in the article is how the work of Solomon Golomb in his book "Polyominoes" inspired the design of Tetris. https://www.fi.edu/laureates/solomon-w-golomb

Funny story and a great game.