Tetris Is Forty Years Old | Hacker News Reader

Tetris Is Forty Years Old

bbc.com

51 pointsmudil20 comments

The June 1984 date is a fabrication that was invented by The Tetris Company in 2009 so they could have a 25th anniversary event at that year's E3. Every source from before 2009 points to Tetris releasing in 1985. https://tetrisconcept.net/threads/june-6-1984.2411/

Props for sharing the true date!

Wow, thank you for a cool fact about tetris

The first real startup I was ever part of was Blue Lava Technologies, based out of Honolulu, HI. Our main investor was Henk Rogers of Tetris fame. On the same floor of our building there was also the Tetris company, and right on the other side of my cubicle wall was the QA department. It was a tiny little room with 3-4 game consoles and a few computers where they would test and test and test and test every variation of Tetris imaginable. I became friends with them and eventually started to date one of the members of the QA team. She was obscenely good at Tetris and taught me so much about strategy and how to nail various t-spin moves. When Tetris took over Facebook gaming she would jump on my account and play all my friends absolutely sweeping the floor with them.

Such a fun game that really does stand the test of time and will last forever. It's been a while since I played so much that I started to see and dream about the shapes - might be time to pick it back up.

I downloaded the Tetris iOS game a few days ago.

It is splashed with fullscreen ads, which are very hard to dismiss. Multiple times I've 'clicked' the ad while thinking I was getting rid of it. The normal game mode has 'goals' which appear to be the same two things over and over: get x points, clear y rows. There is some kind of competition (or gamble? I don't know -- there are prizes.) Maybe in-game purchases? You need to pay coins for some things? I can't tell, I'm trying to avoid the buttons.

There is a 'delete your data' button in settings that takes you to a form you have to fill out, finding data codes from some other location. It's as user-unfriendly as you can get.

The actual gameplay takes ages to load; I cannot understand how simple game logic like a Tetris game can have a ten-second loading period to start the app and multiple seconds to load the Tetris part. The music is exactly the same, no variations. The graphics are unimaginative. I can even criticise the icon: the icon is mostly a grid of filled squares like Breakout, it barely _looks_ like Tetris.

I can barely believe how bad a once-famous game like this has become.

Link, if you really want it :( https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tetris/id1491074310

> I can barely believe how bad a once-famous game like this has become.

The officially licensed PC/console Tetrises are still fine, but yeah the licensed mobile versions are universally garbage. As I mentioned in another comment you should probably just install the Delta emulator instead and use it to play a good modern Tetris like Apotris (https://akouzoukos.com/apotris) or one of the licensed console versions (NES, GB, DS...)

Parent is right though. Tech, computing power, software, OSes etc have advanced enormously.

And yet, run 20..30y+ old game on emulator often gives more satisfaction than ad-riddled, bloated modern incarnations. Pathetic! And still many people put up with the latter.

Ok I can understand a big mobile game on which a whole team of developers worked over a year, needs funding. And ad-supported is how it's done these days. But Tetris? A simple chess game or breakout clone? Come on...

Never mind that if [funding to create games] were a goal, then "open source, or at least remove ads once creation cost have been recouped" should be considered. Ever seen a (big) mobile game developer do that?

How much did it cost?

I used to work for a free to play mobile game company and something like half my colleagues had come from paid-install companies that went under. We hate this too but have rent to pay.

The “official” Tetris games suck. If you want actually good tetris sites, I would recommend tetr.io or jstris.jezevec10.com.

Reminds me of mortal kombat X on the playstation 4. Starting it up I thought it was exactly like a shitty F2P mobile game. Full screen ads you have to click past just to get to the main menu, even more ads on the main menu once you get there, paywalled off characters and moves, time gates, etc. I can't imagine paying full price for a game and putting up with that shit. I picked it up years after release, paid less than $10 for a used copy, and before round 1 I was already feeling ripped off. I don't know how much of that crap was there from the start, but I know the game got good reviews when it came out.

I think that mobile games are a lost cause but I'm so happy that not all console/PC titles ended up being polluted by ads and greedy mobile game tactics. I picked up Stellar Blade a while back and was so happy to see that it included none of that garbage and that game was even made by a mobile game developer.

And we've just seen a new high score world record earlier this year!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuJ5UuknsHU

(Sorry for linking a 16 minute video, but it's better than any article I've found.)

Here is more recent video that beats those records: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPyf5kIGoKA

Except! Even this is now out of date, and I think BlueScuti has broken some of these records! The Tetris leaderboards are very active at the moment.

That was super interesting and well worth the 16 minutes, thanks for the link!

I only use the iPhone for these kinds of games.

Unfortunately, Tetris turned into some weird kind of adware, a few years ago, with no option to just pay a bunch of money, and not be bugged (I would have been happy to do that).

I haven't played in years. :'(

The Tetris Company is very stingy about how many licenses they hand out, and mobile games they do license are always terrible. Your best bet is probably to take advantage of the Delta emulator that's now available on the App Store, and use it to play a high quality Tetris like Apotris: https://akouzoukos.com/apotris

I would also recommend try making a Tetris clone yourself. Tetris is a sufficiently simple game at its core, and with the tools available today it's a rewarding and painless experience.

I assume you won't get in trouble unless you try to distribute it widely.

For the 30th anniversary I worked with some friends on an implementation using ClojureScript: https://github.com/imalooney/t3tr0s

You can play online here: http://t3tr0s.com/

Battle Mode is especially fun with a group :) You can see everyone's board in real-time on this page: http://t3tr0s.com/#/spectate

My Russian is very, very, rusty. Is there a version of this in English ?

The New Tetris on the N64 is the best version there is. You can store a piece, create 4x4 cubes for bonus points, and a few other shenanigans.

well, I couldn't stay eleven forever

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