Who invented tetris battle

Gerasimov reports that Pajitnov chose the name "Tetris" as "a combination of 'tetramino' and 'tennis'. The most recent version of this port is available on Gerasimov's web site. The IBM PC version eventually made its way to Budapest, Hungary, where it was ported to various platforms and was "discovered" by a British software house named Andromeda.

They attempted to contact Pajitnov to secure the rights for the PC version, but before the deal was firmly settled, they had already sold the rights to Spectrum HoloByte. After failing to settle the deal with Pajitnov, Andromeda attempted to license it from the Hungarian programmers instead. The game's popularity was tremendous, and many players were instantly hooked; Computer Gaming World called the game "deceptively simple and insidiously addictive". The details of the licensing issues were uncertain by this point, but in Andromeda managed to obtain copyright licensing for the IBM PC version and any other home computer system.

The Mirrorsoft version did not feature any background graphics while the Holobyte version had a background picture related to Russian themes for each level. Games were sold as budget titles due to the game's simplicity. By , the Soviet government began to market the rights to Tetris , after a promotional trip to the country by Gerald Hicks, the one time United States champion of the game, through an organization called Elektronorgtechnica, or "Elorg" for short.

Pajitnov had granted his rights to the Soviet Government, via the Computer Center he worked at for ten years. By , half a dozen different companies claimed rights to create and distribute the Tetris software for home computers, game consoles, and handheld systems.

Elorg, meanwhile, held that none of the companies were legally entitled to produce an arcade version, and signed those rights over to Atari Games, while it signed non-Japanese console and handheld rights over to Nintendo.

Tetris was on show at the January Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where it was picked up by Dutch games publisher Henk Rogers, then based in Japan, which eventually led to an agreement brokered with Nintendo that saw Tetris bundled with every Game Boy.

Nintendo contacted Atari Games claiming they had stolen rights to Tetris , whereupon Atari Games sued, believing they had the rights. Sega also released a Tetris game for the Mega Drive ; however, the ensuing blitz of litigation ensured that it was hastily withdrawn.

However, it is estimated that between 3 to 8 copies of Tetris were produced for the Japanese Sega Mega Drive. Due to its extremely high rarity, and because Tetris is a very important and very popular game in video game history, Tetris Mega Drive is a sought after item for video game collectors.

It is one of the "holy grails" of video game collecting. In , the rights to the game reverted from the Russian state to Pajitnov himself, who previously had made very little money from the game. Court of International Trade and the U. Customs have at times issued seizure orders to preclude unlicensed Tetris-like games from being imported into the U. Copyright Office state that copyright does not apply to the rules of a game.

Tetris has been subject to many changes throughout releases since the s. Newer Tetris games have focused on a trend of pace rather than endurance. Since the meter for points is restricted to a specific number of digits, these games' records can be "maxed out" by an experienced player. Even so, players still maxed it to 9,, points after hours of play. For The New Tetris , world record competitors have spent over 12 hours playing the same game. These modes require the player to act under a timer, either to gain the most lines or points in that time.

Releases like Tetris Worlds did away completely with point records. This particular game kept records by how fast a certain number of lines could be cleared depending on the level. Critics of Tetris Worlds said it was flawed by virtue of the ability of a piece to hover over the bottom for as long as a player needs. There are many different modes of play added in recent years.

Modes appearing in more than one major release include: classic marathon game A , sprint otherwise game B or 40 lines , ultra, square, and cascade. The field dimension of Tetris is perhaps the least deviated among releases: almost always 10 cells wide by 20 high. Some releases on handheld platforms with small screens have smaller fields; for example, the Tetris Jr. Traditionally, blocks spawn within the four most central columns and the two highest rows.

The I Tetrimino occupies columns 4, 5, 6 and 7, the O Tetrimino occupies columns 5 and 6, and the remaining 5 Tetriminos occupy columns 4, 5 and 6 or in some, especially older, versions, 5, 6 and 7.

In some more recent games, pieces spawn above the visible playfield. In traditional games, a level-up would occur once every ten lines are cleared. After a level-up, the blocks fall slightly faster, and typically more points are given. In some newer games such as Tetris Worlds , the number of lines required vary upon each new level. For example, NES Tetris operates at 60 frames per second. At level 0, a piece falls one step every 48 frames, and at level 19, a piece falls one step every 2 frames.

Level increments either terminate at a certain point Game Boy Tetris tops off at level 20 or increase forever yet not in speed after a certain point. Modern games such as Tetris the Grand Master or Tetris Worlds, at their highest levels, opt to drop a piece more than one row per frame.

Pieces will appear to reach the bottom as soon as they spawn. As a result, these games have a delay that lets the player slide the piece on the bottom for a moment to help deal with an otherwise unplayable fall speed.

In some games, the hover time is regenerated after a piece is moved or rotated. Soft drops were first implemented in Nintendo releases of Tetris so that pieces would be able to drop faster while not locking as to slide into gaps. The other option is hard dropping, which originated in early PC games such as Microsoft Tetris , a game developed by Dave Edson and bundled with Microsoft Entertainment Pack.

With hard dropping, a piece falls and locks in one frame. Newer Tetris games feature both options. Some games have their locking roles reversed, with soft dropping making the pieces drop faster and locking down, and hard dropping making the pieces drop instantly but not lock. Single direction rotation is an older restriction that has since been ruled out in nearly every new official release by the favor of separate buttons for clockwise and one for counterclockwise rotation.

In traditional games, the unsymmetrical vertical orientation I-, Z-, and S-pieces will fill the same columns for each clockwise and counter clockwise rotation. Some games vary this by allowing two possible column orientations: one for counter clockwise and one for clockwise rotations.

One of the features most appreciated by skilled players is wall kick , or the ability of rotating the pieces even if these touch the left or right walls. In the NES version, for example, if a Z piece is "vertically" aligned and falling touching the left wall, the player cannot rotate the piece, giving the impression that the rotate buttons are locked.

In this situation, the player has to move the piece one position to the right before rotating it, losing precious time. Proper implementations of wall kick first appeared in the arcade version of Tetris by Atari Games. Piece preview allows a look at the next piece to enter the field. This feature has been implemented since the earliest games, though in those early games, having the preview turned on made the score increase more slowly.

Newer versions of Tetris add different scoring goals not present in traditional Tetris. As achieving these goals while not topping out becomes more difficult, these games usually add a few features to help the player. The New Tetris and The Next Tetris are the first official Tetris games to feature multiple piece previews, showing 3 in advance. Tetris DS uses the 6-piece preview.

The New Tetris also introduced the "ghost piece", an obscuration in the shape of the current piece over where that piece would drop. The feature reduces mistakes, especially for beginners and high-speed players. Hold piece is an optional ability to reserve a piece for later use, allowing a player to either avoid undesirable pieces or save desirable ones.

Some clones featured it as a powerup that the player could earn and use once. A hold piece available to the player at all times was first featured in The New Tetris. Most games that have hold piece activate it when the player presses a dedicated button, often a shoulder button; [ 35 ] other games activate it when both rotate buttons are pressed simultaneously.

When hold piece is activated, it causes the falling piece to move to the top and trade places with the hold piece. However, the feature cannot be activated twice in a row; it is disabled until the piece released from hold locks in the well. With initial rotation, when the player holds down the rotation button after the previous piece has locked down but before the next piece comes into the well, the next piece will come into the well in an already rotated state.

Initial hold works similarly, as the piece will be already swapped with the hold piece when it enters the well. This new version also takes advantage of the touch screen in the added "Touch Mode," which has no time limit. Instead, every block is already placed in a tall tower, and the player uses the stylus from the Nintendo DS to shift blocks left and right and, in earlier towers, rotate blocks. The goal is to clear enough lines so that a cage of balloons reaches the ground this mode is themed on the NES video game Balloon Fight , hence the cage of balloons.

In this mode, the pieces fall downward from the top screen to the touch screen, but the stack is moved and rotated instead. As the falling pieces bump against the stack, they get clustered into it. When this happens, the blocks glow and the music changes.

After ten seconds or upon pressing the X button, these blocks disappear and shoot a laser beam in a plus-shape, the horizontal part equal to the number of rows cleared and the vertical equal to the columns. This laser beam will move and rotate with the stack and destroy falling blocks and Metroid enemies in its path until it disappears a moment later.

The parts of the stack not hit by the laser beam will be pulled in towards the center of the stack after the laser beam dies.

If a piece reaches the bottom of the touch screen, the stack hits a falling block while rotating, or the stack hits a Metroid, the stack loses Energy. The player loses if the stack runs out of Energy or if the stack becomes so large that it can no longer fit on the touch screen. In Fusion, "atom" blocks must be activated, the number of those needing to be activated increases per level. Activated atoms wills also activate other atoms that they touch, and are generated two for every seven Tetriminos.

Gravity will not be activated until a line is cleared containing an atom of fusion block. In Sticky, based on The Next Tetris , you need to clear the bottom row of starting tiles.

In each level, there are more starting tiles that are harder to clear. The pieces in this game are made up of different colored minos that "stick" to those of the same color. Gravity is always a factor. The Tetris arcade game by Atari Games offered different "puzzles" for selected rounds. The first three rounds are played normally, with no obstacles. At the start of round 4, eight bricks are placed vertically along each side of the well.

Round 5 begins with ten bricks scattered throughout the bottom five rows. Round 6 begins with 20 bricks arranged in a pyramid. In rounds 7 through 9, the well starts out empty but single bricks will appear at random on top of your puzzle each time a piece lands that does not clear any lines, potentially thwarting any planning one may have done.

In rounds 10 through 12, incomplete "garbage" lines will randomly pop up underneath your puzzle, pushing the puzzle upward, when a piece lands without clearing any lines.

Rounds 13 through 15 begin with more blocks arranged in predetermined patterns, and the cycle continues throughout the remaining rounds in the game in groups of three. Several Tetris variants exist. Some feature alternate rules and pieces, and others have completely different gameplay. Because of its popularity and the relatively simple code required to produce the game, a game with nearly the same rules as Tetris is often used as a hello world project for programmers coding for a new system or programming language.

This has resulted in the availability of a large number of ports for different platforms. Players lose a typical game of Tetris when they can no longer keep up with the increasing speed, and the Tetriminos stack up to the top of the playing field. This is commonly referred to as topping out. In the past few years alone, we received the adorable Puyo Puyo Tetris mash-up, soared along with the award-winning Tetris Effect , struggled for supremacy against other players in Tetris 99 , and even got our hands on a previously unpublished version of Tetris through the Sega Genesis Mini.

Not even Pajitnov can keep up with everything; he was genuinely surprised when I told him about the lost edition of Tetris that hit the Genesis Mini. That's not to suggest Pajitnov isn't tuned in to what's going on in his Tetris kingdom. We discussed some of the newer games, and Tetris' continued potential as a competitive pastime, a door that opened with last year's Tetris 99 for the Switch.

They [Nintendo] did a great job on it," Pajitnov says, citing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as one of his favorite games on the system and lamenting how his son keeps stealing it away from him. But Tetris 99 is the game he's most excited about, since that's where he sees the franchise's future.

That's good, and we're just adjusting the game to new user interfaces. But for two-player modes and serious competition, there are several challenges to overcome. We're getting there very slowly but surely. While Pajitnov isn't quite as over-the-moon about Tetris Effect, he's still very impressed by its ethereal graphics.

But it was so long ago, maybe 20 years. I can't remember. What's a decade here or there, though? The future of Tetris looks energetic and surprisingly diverse, but Pajitnov is careful not to constantly operate at a " level nine, high five " pace. He winds down by reading, watching television, and staying active. He's also working on games that don't involve spinning letter blocks. I have two very old friends. They live in Saint Petersburg.

Rogers loved the game from the first time he played it, but noted the beginning, tutorial levels were slow—and could bore some players. To add excitement, he suggested to Pajitnov that bonuses be given for completing two and three lines at a time, something that became a beloved part of the game.

Tetris has been included in more than 30 scientific studies over the years. A study found that playing the game helped the brain operate more efficiently. In , Dr. And last year, doctors at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre found a variation of the game was effective at treating adult amblyopia, also known as "lazy eye. New York City's Museum of Modern Art has all sorts of curiosities, but the fully playable version of the original version of Tetris is among the most fun.

The game is part of the museum's Applied Design exhibit, alongside "Pac-Man," "Myst:"and other titles. Psychologists at Plymouth University found in February that playing Tetris for just three minutes can help reduce cravings.

That makes it a fun diet aid for people trying to lose weight, as well as a useful tool for people cutting back on drinking or trying to stop smoking. Tetris' theme song is a classic—literally. The music that plays during the game is a remake of "Korobeiniki," a 19th century Russian folk song. While game site IGN in called Pajitnov "the ultimate video game one-hit wonder," he's actually been quite successful beyond Tetris.

He originated and designed "Hexic," which was included with every new Xbox Premium package, the first version of the console with a 20 GB hard drive. Skip Navigation.