Why Microsoft Entertainment Pack had a sticker announcing that it had Tetris? | Hacker News Reader

Why Microsoft Entertainment Pack had a sticker announcing that it had Tetris?

devblogs.microsoft.com

78 pointstybulewicz54 comments

The sticker part makes sense, but why did it say "now," which usually would imply it once didn't include Tetris? I guess "includes Tetris!" just sounded awkward on its own?

Or maybe they made stickers for the contingency where they would ship some without Tetris, get the license, and ship some more with?

Could be a psychological trick to make consumers think that they're buying an "improved" version.

The latter sounds very plausible, it covers all bases.

Maybe it's as simple as for the people making the boxes, it didn't contain Tetris from the start. And when they got the license, in their head, it now did have Tetris.

Most boxes don't contain anything from the start; you need to put the product in them before you sell them!

As the article stated; they made the boxes before they had secured the license. I.e. the boxes were made before the content was ready.

I understand. I was making a joke, but I guess it didn't land

It at least landed with me, I had a sensible chuckle :)

Yeah, sorry... It did not. Is it a reference I don't get?

Nope, not a reference! Just being silly and pretending that the sticker is accurate because at some point before the box was packed, it did not contain Tetris (or any other games), and then once it got packed, only then did it contain Tetris. Technically speaking, the contents of almost any box can be accurately labeled "now contains X!" because few boxes are constructed with their contents in them; stuff gets added to them after, which means at some point they did not contain whatever they're holding.

Thanks for the patience. After a good nights sleep I see it straight away... "Now includes well rested brain".

Or maybe there was some pre-release catalog listings/marketing that listed the games without Tetris?

    Now with more Tetris!

    Sweet Jesus!

https://youtu.be/HhI_f2WtUOs?t=227

Timeless classic, I knew what it was before clicking!

Microsoft has always had plausible sounding but contextually nonsensical writing/UI.

E.g. In Outlook, it says (or used to?) "All done for the day!" when your inbox is empty. It's like they see how other UI/writing is done and copy it, but they don't think about it. Yes, other mailboxes say things like, "all done". Yes, "done for the day" is a common phrase. But no, it doesn't make sense in this context.

Same with the sticker. It's very common for a sticker-style design element on packaging to say "Now with...!". So they just did that without thinking.

They do the same thing with UI controls/patterns, but I can't think of an example off the top of my head right now. You'll see something in Windows and think, "ok, I see why you did that, because other software does that, but it doesn't make sense here."

Microsoft is run by a collective of aliens who are pretty good at imitating humans, but fall just a bit short.

I read the "now" as pure marketing. It creates a little sense of "this just got better" even if there was never actually a Tetris-less version on shelves

Because a sticker "includes Tetris" on a box that doesn't mention Tetris otherwise seems like a mistake, while "now includes Tetris" sounds like there's been a change that made the information on the box out-of-date/incomplete?

The actual game is playable in uour browser on archive.org https://archive.org/details/TETRIS_201612

It's not an old version of Tetris, so many of the niceties of modern Tetris are absents. Up to rotate irks me (because it's well accepted that being able to rotate a piece both clockwise and counterclockwise is beneficial).

Anyone have a larger collection of stories/anecdotes from the older days of computing?

Stories like this, and the Quake cd posted recently, are hugely interesting to me.

Raymond Chen certainly publishes such tidbits on his Microsoft blog

In addition to the blog where this post is taken from https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/, you could check https://folklore.org/ for early Apple anecdotes. And also https://www.jwz.org/blog/ for early Netscape/Mozilla stories

Apparently jwz doesn't like HN, if you click that link you just get an image of a testicle in an eggcup

And it seems to store that info locally as even typing the url manually after being redirected from here you still get the eggcup. Using the link in private mode does work though, probably need to clear the local storage

using a different browser works fine too (tried edge after chrome)

I thought that link was safe to click at work.

I thought wrong :(

sorry, I forgot that it did that when clicked from HN. I usually access it from my bookmarks.

I also like https://computer.rip/ - not personal anecdotes from people who were there, but definitely well researched and interesting technology history.

yes that's a great one! I read it semi-regularly but forgot to mention it!

Given the context and your reference to Quake, I assume by "the older days" you mean the 90s, and specifically PCs and early Windows?

If you weren't previously aware of "The Old New Thing" blog, Raymond Chen has been sharing stories about Windows 95 development for decades at this point. So many in fact, he published a book under the same name (the book is essentially a best-of collection from the blog in paper form).

The os2museum[1] blog is also a gold mine. Tim Paterson at one point tried to start blogging, sharing a few anecdotes about the early days of DOS[2]

Speaking of books, you might enjoy "Showstopper!" about the development of NT, even tough it is a bit shallow on the technical side. For the technical aspects, you might want to get it together with "Inside Windows NT" (first edition) by Helen Custer.

You might also enjoy: "Another Boring Topic" [3] YouTube channel, covering (among other things) early Windows development in excruciating detail and "Old Computers Sucked" [4], actually trying to run the software on era appropriate hardware. "Cathode Ray Dude" is all over the place but often also covers hardware and software of roughly that era[5].

A sibling comment already mentioned JWZs blog, if you have fond memories about Netscape, you might enjoy "Project Code Rush" [6].

Btw. Netscape Navigator 3.0 has just turned 30.

[1] https://www.os2museum.com/wp/

[2] https://dosmandrivel.blogspot.com/

[3] https://www.youtube.com/@AnotherBoringTopic/videos

[4] https://www.youtube.com/@old-computers-sucked/videos

[5] https://www.youtube.com/@CathodeRayDude/videos

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

Link number 2, about Tim Paterson, was new to me. Thanks.

I can recommend "The Digital Antiquarian" for games (https://www.filfre.net/) and "Abort Retry Fail" for hardware companies (https://www.abortretry.fail/)

I find these stories way more interesting than polished "history of computing" summaries

What happened to the headline? The post is headlined "Why did the Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows have a special sticker announcing that it also had Tetris?", which is a correctly formed English sentence.

The HN headline currently says "Why Microsoft Entertainment Pack had a sticker announcing that it had Tetris?", which... isn't.

Hacker News has an 80 character limit for titles. The full title is 111 characters, so the submitter editorialised it to cut down the length to 77 characters.

Usually, when you're editing something, you try to make sure your output is legal in the target language.

The shortest 'legal' sentence I can come up with is 82 Characters

"Why did Microsoft Entertainment Pack have a sticker announcing that it had Tetris?"

The had... had... is doing the heavy lifting for omitting the 'did' - but it's perfectly comprehensible.

More to the point, 'English' doesn't have a Universal agreed dialect, pronunciation, or spelling. You'd lose your mind trying to square the circle of Hiberno English - the language of Joyce, Beckett, Keane, Wilde, Yeats et al - based on your notions of 'proper' English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiberno-English

How about

> Why did Microsoft Entertainment Pack announce that it had Tetris

The sticker seems like an important aspect.

Which the article can state, but the headline needs to fit.

Why it was announced specifically on a sticker (rather than on the box like the other games) is the core of the question - the headline no longer really works without it. I'd go with one of:

> Why did Microsoft Entertainment Pack have a sticker announcing it had Tetris?

> Why did Microsoft Entertainment Pack announce that it had Tetris on a sticker?

> Why the Microsoft Entertainment Pack had a sticker announcing it had Tetris

But doesn't really matter that much.

> The shortest 'legal' sentence I can come up with is 82 Characters

You can put the mangled headline into actual English by shortening it:

Why Microsoft Entertainment Pack had a sticker announcing that it had Tetris

Headlines have long had their own grammatical rules only roughly aligning to English in the limit...

This is not something that could appear in any newspaper.

> Just like how World War I was initially called “The Great War”. If you had called it “World War I” from the outset, people would look at you funny, like “Do you know something I don’t?”

This is why I didn't, at the time.

Jokes aside, some people knew and so it was also called (though not very commonly) World War starting 1914 and First World War from 1918. Because of course it wouldn't be the last. World War 3 was first talked about in 1941. And the famous idea that World War 4 would be fought with sticks and stones was first mentioned in 1946.

So the correct answer to "Do you know something I don’t?" is "I know human nature"

My country was neutral so no we never called it the great war.

For the Netherlands it was just a footnote.

https://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1851.html

How much faster are manufacturing timelines now compared to back then? How long was a lead time for such printing job back then compared to now? Has it gotten easier or not? Seems like there is real question here how long it will take to print batch before manufacturing.

Weird question, and not really a mystery. It's been documented to death.

Tetris sold like hot cakes in the late 80s and early 90s. There was a gold rush for the license.

Just look at the Game Boy. Tetris made it successful.

The mystery isn't why Tetris was valuable though. It's why it was only mentioned on a sticker instead of being part of the original packaging

In a way, this is a real-world example of the Strategy Pattern: keep the stable structure fixed, while making the uncertain part replaceable later.

Open/Closed priciple

Does anyone have a photo of this box? I can't find it online; I'm only able to find Entertainment Pack 1.

Funny how much risk management is hidden in something as mundane as a sticker

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