Tetris: The Soviet 'mind game' that took over the world (2019)
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
Typically I'll do this while listening to other things like technical talks or tutorials. I found in college that I was able to better focus on the lecture if I was playing Tetris. In fact for some people, having something that is "distracting" to do while listening, has been to be effective in improving recall [1]. It's been pretty huge in helping me make it through a lot of stuff I would have otherwise found dull.
Beyond that, it's an amazingly hard game to master. You can't "Win", you can just do better and there is something hard to describe about how you play "Clean vs Dirty" "High Risk vs Low risk" etc...that wouldn't seem obvious if you're just looking at it as a silly game. I'm certainly attaching more significance on it than others would, but I think Tetris is a really great metaphor for life in a lot of regards.
[1]https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/the-thinking-benefits-of...
edit: Yes, I guess that would just be a counter. But it'd be fun to see how many miles a relic like this actually has.
IMO those break the game and I wish the Tetris Company wouldn't keep insisting on their inclusion!
Part of the fun of Tetris is, sometimes you have pieces that just don't go well anywhere, or which you just couldn't maneuver in time, and you have to find a way to recover from those errors.
Multiplayer Tetris is a very different game. Speed is paramount regardless of how quickly pieces fall, and players need to deal with garbage blocks. Thus, it makes sense for players to have more options and maneuverability.
However, when you put these mechanics into traditional singleplayer marathon mode, they become a problem.
I've only ever played the GameBoy Tetris game, both on the original Game Kart and on 3DS Virtual Console, and it only has spin and drop buttons.
"EasySpin" is also known as "Infinity" depending on who you talk to. Basically, as long as you continue to move and/or turn a piece when it hits the bottom, it won't actually lock in place. This is very easy to abuse.
Neither of these so-called features is in the Gameboy version, so you wouldn't know about them. :) However, they're in basically ever modern Tetris game.
Is it largely the same as NES Tetris?
Huh, well maybe I’m using the wrong term then. But whatever locking system was on e.g. Tetris Effect was totally abusable and stupid.
Pieces should lock when they hit the bottom, period, at least in single player. Like they do in NES Tetris.
I would guess that the simplicity of the interface and rules.
Just try to watch this insane match with the new champ Joseph Salee (who is a teenager) vs. the legend Koryan, without getting pumped up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfo8hmIcoDQ
CTWC is a serious deal that you need to train for, though you can't really make much of a living on it yet like you would with DOTA or otherwise.
My team when they first met me thought I was showing them that I am uninterested when doing that. Now when they need a hard decision or bring a difficult problem they come with paper and pens.
This somehow became a private joke.
> More importantly, the lead developer of LOCKJAW is a fan of free software, or software that the public can improve and share, as a means to protect the rights of users of computing devices. He does not share the belief expressed by Alexey Pajitnov, co-founder of The Tetris Company, that free software "should never have existed" because it "destroys the market." (Mr. Pajitnov explained further in a 2015 interview with Matt Barton.) But what really destroys the market is monopoly.
> In fact, though Mr. Pajitnov and his partner Henk Rogers want Tetris to become an internationally competitive sport, as Mr. Pajitnov mentioned in earlier in the same interview, a policy against free software makes it that much harder. Imagine if there were a Basketball Company LLC that could sue a city or school district for copyright infringement for putting a basketball court with correct dimensions into a city park or school gymnasium. There are multiple competing suppliers of basketball and chess equipment, unlike software for playing Tetris. This is why Chess is a sport and Tetris is not: Chess has no owner.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/06/defining-tetris-how-c...
But the courts have ruled that making a game with the exact elements (tetronimos, ghost pieces, next-piece, 8x10 rows) infringes copyright. You cannot make a Tetris-clone without saying Tetris, without infringing on those elements. EVEN if you add additional functionality (the game in the article had powerups, etc,)
If tetris(1) get purged I suppose a sudoku clone would fit
the gap, or some ncurses Arkanoid clone.
The specifics of Tetris, including the use of tetrominos and the dimensions of the board -- are protected by copyright which The Tetris Company has successfully defended in court.
It may suck, but as The Tetris Company and the Blurred Lines ruling have shown, copyrights in the USA are pretty broad. In general, it is a violation of copyright to make a clone of a game; see Atari v. Philips in which the court found that cloning Pac-Man was illegal, despite the cloned game having completely different code, assets, and subtly different mechanics. This is why I believe Oracle v. Google will be ruled in favor of Oracle.
In addition, The Tetris Company owns trademarks on the shapes of the tetromino pieces themselves, so even without broad copyright protection, all clones of Tetris would still be illegal.
Alexey: Yes, I am not sure I don’t remember me saying it back in 2008, but I could sign this work now.
Matt: What do you not like about it?
Alexey: Basically, if it is just a very small piece of software which young guy need to show off came up and tried to please his friends, that is fine. It might be free, but generally the good games as the result of very hard work of several people, I just don’t understand why those people should work for free. It never happens in this world you know? So it is very honest and normal work, which doesn’t make anyone immediately millionaire or anything like that. it is a hard job, which needs to be compensated and the price of, and smile small price of the game should make it. I feel it is absolutely normal and proper way to develop this stuff. So people don’t, somehow people are rigid to pay kind of 4 dollars for small couple or few and then do it for 10 minutes, but they have trouble to pay kind of half of this price and get 3 or 4 hours of really good time with the game. That is ridiculous.
You can sell free software, but it is very much the exception rather than the rule, and it is pretty disingenuous of those who promote it to keep making this claim.
What would you do as a software oriented person if you had nothing to eat? Why would you care about artificial software scarcity imposed by a government that can't even guarantee working people food on the table?
You might be underestimating how traumatic and desperate an experience the nineties were for so many people in eastern Europe. People are obviously not very forthcoming with the hardest of their stories, but here's one anecdote.
A very close friend - an engineer during the Soviet era- hadn't been paid his wage for months on end. He survived for an entire week in ~1994 on a "creatively sourced" giant box of bananas. For a week. On bananas!
What does something like that do to people? How would you react in a similar situation?
The same is bound to happen, sooner or later, to Tetris.
Despite being in the public domain, The Tetris Company still asserts and defends IP rights to the song: specifically, the song is trademarked to The Tetris Company when used as video game music.
IMHO, descendants of Nekrasov, if any, should contest this copyright claim and collect damages.
And, second question, does this mean there can't be 'folk songs' in Russian? (I mean, English, despite being an official language in several countries, certainly has folk songs, for instance.)
But in this case, I was just wondering about which languages (in the pseudohistory) are considered 'folk languages'. Does Ukrainian count as a 'folk language'? Are all Slavic languages in Russia that aren't Russian 'folk languages'?
And "молва" doesn't mean "язык" in Russian at all - it means "rumors".
If you dig deeper, you will see that every folk choir in Russia has it repertoire split in two parts: songs in Russian, and folk songs in their own native language.
Yep, it's possible for folk songs to exist in Russian language. However, currently, no folk songs in Russian language are found. I spent years looking for one.
I predict Tetris-brain will play a key role in unlocking the secrets of human consciousness sometime in the future... :-)
This one came for free with the Nintendo Switch online service and I've put around 80 hours into it and - frustratingly - still haven't won a single game! Highest I got was 4th place, though I usually end up in top 20 and occasionally in the top 10.
It's so much fun.
I don't know what patterns are in place these days though.
Basically like a short book on the context of Soviet computing, how Tetris got to the West, how Nintendo got the rights, what happened afterwards. It's an excellent read. With all the shady deals and fun period details I almost feel this would make a great movie.
"Yet Stein found the game to be a harder sell than he’d anticipated. For all that everyone who sat down to play it seemed to have difficulty standing up again, Tetris was just so different from anything else that marketing departments didn’t know quite what to do with it. It was all just so abstract. There was no obvious hook: no starring character, no story line, no explosions. What would they put on the box? Even Brøderbund, home of The Print Shop and Carmen Sandiego, whose instinct for selling software to Middle America was normally unparalleled, took a pass, despite the Tetris Effect taking place right there in their offices. “I don’t think Brøderbund is going to publish it,” wrote Mechner in disgust. “The knaves.” A Brøderbund executive, seeing his programming staff so consumed by the game, had allegedly called it “a game only programmers could like.”"
Tetris initially reached widespread popularity in Japan through the arcade version made by Sega, which was released at the end of 1988. It was awarded "best arcade game of the year" by several Japanese magazines. This arcade version featured a 2-player mode and followed what came to be known as the "Sega rotation" ruleset due to restrictions on piece rotations.
The Sega version was ported to the newly-released Mega Drive (Genesis) console and was scheduled to be released in early 1989. It was to be the Mega Drive's killer title, but when the release day came, stores did not get any shipments in. It was later discovered that Nintendo had sued Atari over the rights to the game right before the release of the Mega Drive port in Japan (Atari had given the rights to its subsidiary Tengen, who had licensed them to Sega in Japan). Nintendo won, and Sega was left with a huge stock of games that were eventually repurposed or destroyed.
The Game Boy version wasn't released until mid-1989 in Japan, and the NES version after that. They became massive hits, but it is less commonly known that they were preceded in popularity by the Sega arcade version.
Eventually, the Mega Drive port showed up on a bootleg 2-in-1 cart from China, also featuring Rambo III. Somehow the bootleggers had gotten hold of the ROM. It turns out the Mega Drive port wasn't a very good one. Last year, in honor of this legacy, Sega released an updated port with the Mega Drive Mini.
Free to use, default mode is battle royale, can easily enter 1-player sprint modes (e.g. 40L) or set up a private room to battle friends
The most ported virtual machine is gaming related too: the Z-machine :).
Both are games/envs which can be played (at least up to version 5) under a "high end" machine with a Z80 processor.