ICM - Leeds Design Agency

…computer games start reaching milestone birthdays!

One of the world’s best recognised and undoubtedly one of the most addictive computer games celebrates it’s 25th birthday this week.

It was Alexey Pajitnov at the Moscow Academy of Science that programmed the iconic falling-block game we all know and love as Tetris, in June 1984 for a Soviet computer system called Electronika. New agency Reuters cites June 6 as the date that the first playable version of the game was born.

“I started to put together all kinds of mathematical puzzles and diversions that I had loved all my life, since I was a boy,” says Pajitnov in a recent Guardian interview, “The program wasn’t complicated, there was no scoring, no levels. But I started playing and I couldn’t stop. That was it.”

Initially Tetris was a slow-grower, a PC version spread through eastern Europe during 1985 and it wasn’t until 1988 when a Dutch games producer, Henk Rogers saw the potential of Tetris whilst at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Rogers was working in Japan at the time and after stiff competition brokered a deal with Nintendo to bundle Tetris with every GameBoy sold. In a fantastic moment of harmony, the Gameboy succeeded due to the playability and addictive nature of Tetris, and vice-versa; 30 million people where now playing Tetris religiously.

It wasn’t until 1996 when Pajitnov was rewarded for his efforts – when the rights reverted to him from the Russian state. By then he had moved to the US and was working as a games designer at Microsoft.

These days, Pajitnov and Rogers spend their time licensing Tetris to other programmers; they maintain the ‘Tetris guidelines’ – an exacting standard that any official version of the game must meet.

Amongst other things, these guidelines are set out so others adhere to the size of the playing area, the colours of the tetronimos, the configuration of keys and buttons used to move the blocks.

Amusingly in the rules is the demand that the game should include a version of the Tetris theme music – a Russian folk song called Korobeiniki.

I wonder if any of today’s gaming masterpieces will survive the next 25 years? I guess the key to success, like most things, is beautiful simplicity.

So go on, spend five minutes of your lunchbreak playing Tetris. Just try not to become addicted!