Twenty years of Tetris pass

THAT'S RIGHT. Tetris is celebrating its 20th birthday, and you're invited to the party. Bring your own vodka.

Stern.de presents a brief history of Tetris, which I will highlight for your English reading pleasure, and digress from, for my own enjoyment.

Despite being a perennial favorite for two decades running, the Russian video game hasn't generated much wealth for its two inventors, Alexey Pajitnov and Vadim Gerassimov. But they had that whole iron curtain, Kremlin thing going for them back then, so they didn't need money. That's how communism works, right?

The simplest games are generally the best. And Pajitnov's idea was a simple adaptation of a board game called Pentamino. The 29 year-old programmer made the first prototype from a glass and little blocks to drop inside it, each of which consisted of four cubes. You got extra points for completing a row.

Pajitnov's friend, Gerassimov, was sixteen at the time, and did the programming to allow the game to run on western IBM computers. The blocks hit the fan after that.

Copies of the game spread like bird flu in a poorly ventilated aviary. By the end of the 1980s, no less than six different companies claimed to own the rights to Tetris, although none of them did.

But Pajitnov and Gerassimov have moved on. Today, both of them live in the U.S. and develop video games. Not a bad place for the squares to land. µ