John Clemente, shown playing "Tetris" at Barcade in New York City, has been playing the game since he was a kid. "I'd stay up, wait for my parents to go to bed, smuggle my Nintendo into my bedroom, hook it up to my television and play this game until all hours of the morning," said John Clemente, another player at Barcade. "Tetris," he says, was the only game to drive him "to the point of insanity."
NEW YORK (June 3)- With its scratches and sticky brown beer stains, the "Tetris" arcade machine near the back of a Brooklyn bar called Barcade has seen better days. Which makes sense, given that the machine was made in the 1980s.
Even today, though, it's not hard to find 20- and 30-somethings plucking away at its ancient controls, flipping shapes made up of four connected squares and fitting them into orderly patterns as they descend, faster and faster as the game goes on.
Completed by a Soviet programmer in 1984, "Tetris" has come a long way from its square roots. It's played by millions, not just on computers and gaming consoles but now on Facebook and the iPhone as well.
"Tetris" stands out as one of the rare cultural products to come West from the Soviet Union during the Cold War. And the addictive rhythm of its task-by-task race against time was an early sign of our inbox-clearing, Twitter-updating, BlackBerry-thumbing world to come.
“For me, it was just a moment ago,” said Alexey Pajitnov, adding that he was 29 years old when he crafted the computer code for Tetris in June 1984.
Pajitnov made a computer program that he came to call Tetris, which basically involves a player manipulating variously shaped blocks dropping along a screen with the goal of getting them to mesh into rows without gaps.
Blue Planet Software’s chief executive, Henk Rogers, was at a major Consumer Electronics Show in 1988 when he spied Tetris. He was scouring the event for video games for the Japanese market.
“My job was to find many games, but I kept coming back to Tetris,” Rogers said. “I realized I was hooked on it. It totally mesmerized me.”
Rogers arranged to publish versions of Tetris for computer games. Early in 1989, he and Minoru Arakawa of Nintendo went to Moscow to license the rights to the video game. Nintendo saw Tetris as an ideal fit for its Game Boy handheld devices.
Since Pajitnov’s game was considered Russian property, licensing was negotiated with government officials.
“At that time, Russia was a little behind,” Arakawa recalled. “We brought computers, printers and lawyers with us so we could type the draft, change it and have a final copy to sign. It took a few days.”
Tetris became a computer game hit and has stayed that way, commanding about 10 percent of the market, according to Rogers.
“Tetris is so popular because it transcends culture,” Rogers said. “There is no violence, no ideology; the player creates order out of chaos.”
Rogers and Pajitnov kicked off a Tetris 25th anniversary celebration on Tuesday at the opening of a premier E3 video game industry gathering in Los Angeles.
“It’s awesome when you look at the industry and everyone spending millions on graphics and music and more, and here we are with Tetris just kicking ass,” Rogers said. “It is an enviable position.”
Blue Planet is working on international Tetris Games along the lines of an Olympics.
“We are looking to turn Tetris into a spectator sport,” Rogers said.
Pajitnov now divides his time between homes in Moscow and Seattle.
He and Rogers, through Blue Planet, license Tetris rights to game makers such as Nintendo and Electronic Arts. “Tetris is the best-selling mobile phone game of all time, showing continued growth year after year all around the world,” said Adam Sussman, vice president of worldwide publishing for EA Mobile. “Tetris has had a significant impact on the entire video game industry.”
More than a million Tetris games are reportedly played daily at a tetrisfriends.com Web site launched in March.
source : thejakartaglobe.com & msnbc.msn.com
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