Tetris

From GPWiki

Tetris is a game in which various falling blocks are to be organized and arranged to form rows with no spaces. It is one of the most well-known video games ever made and has been the center of much legal dispute in the late 80's and early 90's.

Pentomino

Tetris is based off the ancient puzzle game in which oddly shaped figures consisting of five squares (thus penta) into a box of 60 squares. The box could be 3x20, 5x12, or 6x10. It was a classic, slow paced puzzle game. That changed with Tetris.

The Birth of Tetris

When the Russian Alexey Pazhitnov first invented Tetris in 1985, he changed the pieces from Pentomino to be only four squares, instead of the original five. He also added the now classic "falling block" style, making Pentomino into a new arcade style game. The name Tetris came from the Greek tetra meaning four, because he made the pieces four squares.

Tetris moved out of Russia

From Moscow, Tetris reached Budapest, Hungary in 1986. There it was ported to the Apple II and Commodore 64 from its original IBM PC. Eventually, Tetris made its way to the US and Japan through contracts made by the British man Robert Stein. Stein never got rights from Pazhitnov to sell Tetris, but he did anyway. This created a legal dispute that was not resolved until 1996, when Pazhitnov formed the Tetris Compampany LLC and began recieving royalties from the manufacturers that had basically stolen his game.

Tetris for Game Programmers

Today, Tetris has been cloned a countless number of times by programmers around the world. It is often used as a learning tool to learn the basics of game programming.