Tetris

Tetris (transliterated into Cyrillic: Те́трис) is a logic video game originally designed and programmed by Alekséi Pázhitnov in the Soviet Union. It was released on June 6, 1984, while working for the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union in Moscow, Russian SFSR. Its name derives from the Greek number prefix tetra - (all game pieces, known as Tetrominoes containing four segments) and tennis, Pazhitnov's favorite sport.

In Tetris you play with tetrominoes, the special case of four elements of polyominoes. Polyominoes have been used in popular puzzles since at least 1907, with the name given by mathematician Solomon W. Golomb in 1953. However, even the numbering of pentominoes dates back to antiquity. The game (or one of its many variants) is available for almost every game console and PC operating system, as well as on devices such as graphing calculators, mobile phones, portable media players, PDAs, networked music players, and even as an easter egg in non-media products such as oscilloscopes. It has also inspired tabletop services and has been played on the sides of various buildings, holding the record for being the largest fully functional game in the world thanks to the effort of Dutch students in 1995 who illuminated fifteen floors of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Technical University of Delft.

Although different versions of Tetris had been sold for a wide range of home computer and arcade platforms throughout the 1980s, it was the immensely successful portable version for the Game Boy released in 1989 that made it one of the most popular games. all time popular. The 100th issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly awarded Tetris number 1 in the list of "Best Games of All Time". In 2007, Tetris was ranked second in IGN's "Top 100 Video Games of All Time". It has sold over one hundred and seventy million copies as of 2016. In January 2010, it was announced that Tetris had sold more than one hundred million units for mobile phones since the year 2005.

History

Starting from an open-source Tetris.

Aleksei Pázhitnov (Sokolov) had been inspired by a set of pentaminoes he had previously purchased. The name "tetris" derives from the Greek etymon "tetra", which means "four", and refers to the number of squares that make up the pieces. Alekséi Pázhitnov programmed a version of his game on an Electronika 60, according to legend, in a single afternoon. It must be taken into account that what was really complex was coming up with the original idea of the game and not the programming itself. Today the mechanics of the game are well known and it is easy to emulate it.

Tetris began to gain popularity when Vadim Gerasimov, a sixteen-year-old who worked at the Academy, ported the game to the IBM PC. From there it is distributed free to Hungary, where it is programmed for the Apple II and Commodore 64 by Hungarian programmers. These versions come to the attention of Robert Stein, who tries to acquire the rights to the game. Before getting these rights, he sells the stolen concept to the English company Mirrorsoft and its American subsidiary: Spectrum Holobyte, who publish a version for Atari ST and Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Tetris was marketed in Europe and the United States in 1987 with the mention: "Made in the United States, created abroad."

Tetris has historically been one of the most versioned video games and is, along with the Towers of Hanoi, the favorite for novice game programmers. They fought to steal the idea and license it to Atari and Nintendo, the latter finally succeeding thanks to Henk Rogers. Tetris was the companion game to his brand new Game Boy handheld console upon its debut, popularizing both Tetris and the console around the world.

In 1991, Alexei Pázhitnov immigrated to the United States and, five years later, in 1996 he founded his own company, Tetris Company, together with Henk Rogers and appropriated the copyright.

After the success of this game, many others tried to imitate it. Games like Columns or Collapse are examples that have tried to follow in the wake of Tetris, a game that inaugurated a genre within the arcade scene. Atari, for its part, as a "counterattack" for losing the license for this video game, released Klax, a game of skill and intelligence with a theme similar to Columns or Puyo Puyo.

There is a very popular free version on the Internet called TetriNET, which provides a multiplayer version in client-server architecture, in which two to six people can face each other over the network with the Possibility to create teams. It was created in 1997 by St0rmCat and there are currently clients for Windows operating systems (TetriNET itself and Blocktrix, among others), GNU/Linux ( GTetrinet) and Mac OS X (Tetrinet Aqua). The uniqueness of this version is that it adds some special bonuses called cookies that allow you to alter the game of your opponents.

In the XXI century it remains a popular game among a community, breaking records.

Game mechanics

Pieces of Tetris

Different tetriminos, geometric figures made up of four square blocks joined in an orthogonal way, which are generated from an area that occupies 5x5 blocks in the upper area of the screen. There is no consensus as to the dimensions for the in-game area, varying in each version. However, the top two rows are hidden from the player.

The player cannot prevent this falling, but can decide the rotation of the piece (0°, 90°, 180°, 270°) and where it should fall. When a horizontal line is completed, that line disappears and all the pieces above it move down one position, freeing up playing space and therefore making it easier to place new pieces. The fall of the pieces is progressively accelerated. The game ends when the pieces pile up to the top (3x5 blocks in the visible area), interfering with the creation of more pieces and ending the game.

There are different versions of the game. The original has seven different pieces. Later licenses added supplementary shapes, and there are even certain licenses for three-dimensional shapes.

Tetrimino Colors

Pajitnov's original version for the Electronika 60 computer used green brackets to represent blocks. Some people refer to the pieces by the color they are painted in a particular version of the game Tetris, but prior to standardization by The Tetris Company in 2000, these colors have varied from one version to another. after version, so calling the pieces by their color makes no sense. For example, the T piece is different in all versions of the game.

Color of the tetriminos in different versions of the game Tetris

Piece	Tetris original Alexey Pajitnov	MicrosoftTetris	Sega/Arika (TGM series)	The New Tetris	From Tetris Worlds and Tetris DS	Atari/ Arcade	The Soviet Mind Game	Tetris Battle
I	Red	Red	Red	Cyan	Cyan	Red	Red	Cyan
J	White	Magenta	Blue	Blue-violet	Blue	Yellow	Orange	Blue
L	Magenta	Yellow	Orange	Magenta	Orange	Magenta	Magenta	Orange
O	Blue	Cyan	Yellow	Grey Claro	Yellow	Blue	Blue	Yellow
S	Green	Blue	Magenta	Green	Green	Cyan	Green	Red
T	Brown	Grey	Cyan	Yellow	Morado	Green	Green olive	Magenta
Z	Cyan	Green	Green	Red	Red	Orange	Cyan	Green

Variants

There are many variants of Tetris. Currently Blue Planet Software is the owner of the intellectual property of the game, monitoring the quality of the versions that are developed.

Qwirks

It is a variant of Tetris in which the objective is not to form the classic lines, but rather to join groups of three or more blocks of the same color. Qwirks are blocks of a certain color paired in one piece. These pieces fall in principle as in the classic Tetris, the objective being the one outlined above. It has several modalities, among which the "Duel" mode against the computer stands out and is represented by virtual rivals in the form of animals. By defeating each rival, the difficulty and speed of the game increase.

Note that every time players match a specific number of blocks of the same color, more Qwirks fall into the opponent's area.

Magicaliss

The objective in this variation is also to form horizontal lines with the blocks, although there are a series of new rules here, which are the following:

• on the left side of the game board appears a color roulette; if the block is frequently turned to the left or right it will change color.
• There are bright color blocks (you can't change your color), which are very useful for making lines, since they count as any color.
• There are black blocks (can't change their color), which are hard to use, since if you complete a line with them, they don't erase from the board.
• if a horizontal line is formed with blocks of the same color or blocks of a single color and bright blocks, all blocks of that color will be erased from the board.

Dr. Mario

This is a game similar in appearance to Tetris, in which Mario from Nintendo pretends to be a doctor, dropping pills onto the playing field (designed in the shape of a bottle). The player must align the pills in order to defeat one or more viruses depending on the alignment and their colors. Pills have two parts, and each of these parts, as well as viruses, can be one of three colors: red, yellow, and blue. In this way, the six combinations of capsules that can occur in the game are obtained, and that the player must rotate and align so that 4 or more blocks (which can be viruses or parts of capsules) of the same color on the same row or column to make them disappear. The level will end successfully when all the viruses in the bottle are eliminated. The game ends when the capsules block the neck of the bottle and cannot enter any more. The game has 21 levels, and they differ in the progressive number of viruses that initially appear in each level.

Tetris and mathematics

Gravity in the Tetris

The foundation of the game is the polymorphs known as polyominoes, more specifically the combinations of tetraminoes. If, for example, a long sequence of Z-shaped pieces is produced, at some point the player will be forced to leave a hole in the right corner, unable to fill the previous hole. Now a new sequence of pieces is produced in the shape of an S, and so on until the pieces pile up and the game is over.

Since the distribution of the pieces is random, this sequence will eventually occur. In practice, this does not happen because the pseudorandom number generator used in most implementations is a linear congruence generator that does not return such a sequence.

Even with a theoretically perfect random number generator and naive gravity, a good player will be able to withstand the fall of one hundred and fifty pieces, all in the shape of an S or Z. The probability that, at any given time, the next one hundred and fifty pieces are all like this is 1 / (7/2)¹⁵⁰ (approximately 1 / (4 × 10⁸¹)). This number has the same order of magnitude as the number of atoms in the known universe.^{[citation needed]}

Several of the Tetris subproblems have been shown to be NP-complete.

Cognitive effects of Tetris

According to Dr. Richard Haier, playing Tetris for a long time can lead to more efficient brain activity during the game. When playing Tetris For the first time, brain function and activity increase, also increasing brain energy consumption, measured by the glucose metabolic rate. As the Tetris player becomes more skilled, the brain reduces its consumption of energy and glucose, indicating more efficient brain activity for the game. Playing Tetris in a moderate way (half an hour a day for a period of three months) increases cognitive functions such as "critical thinking, reasoning, language processing" and also increases the thickness of the cortex cerebral.

In January 2009, a research group at the University of Oxford led by Dr. Emily Holmes reported in PLoS ONE that in healthy volunteers, playing Tetris shortly after viewing traumatic material in the The laboratory reduced the number of flashbacks that these scenes caused the following week. They believe that gambling can disrupt lingering memories of sights and sounds witnessed, and then re-experienced through involuntary and distressing flashbacks. The group hopes to further develop this approach as a possible intervention to reduce flashbacks experienced in PTSD, but emphasized that these are only preliminary results.

Another notable effect is that, according to a Canadian study from April 2013, playing Tetris has been found to help adolescents with amblyopia (lazy eye), which is better than covering up patch the victim's good eye to train his weaker eye. Dr Robert Hess of the research team said: "It's a lot better than patching, it's a lot more fun, it's faster and it seems to work better." When tested in the UK it also seemed to help children with that problem.

The game can cause you to involuntarily imagine combinations of Tetris even when not playing (the so-called Tetris effect), although this can occur with any video game or real situation that projects the images or scenarios repeatedly, such as puzzles.

Music

• The soundtrack of the second edition (version 1.1) Tetris for Game Boy became one of the best known, to such an extent that level 20 in Tetris DS is based on the original version of the Game Boy version. This is an instrumental arrangement of the Russian popular song called "Korobeiniki", which has been interpreted by different bands like Doctor Spin, Ozma, Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra and the Scooter techno group in their 2007 album. Jumping All Over the World. It was also published in “21 Concepts” by MC Lars and sampled at the base of “Tetris Rap” by Soma and used by Porta in 2006. On the other hand, the Al-Hambre group interprets it to finish all their concerts. In addition, on the stage “Luigi’s Mansion” (De Luigi) Super Smash Bros. Brawl You can use the version called "Tetris: A Type" and "Tetris: B Type".
• The song C in the Game Boy version is an arrangement by Johann Sebastian Bach on the French Suites.
• One of the songs in the NES version is "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy", by The Cascanues, ballet composed of Piotr Ilich Chaikovski.
• A song from the BPS and Tengen versions is “Kalinka”, a famous Russian song written by Ivan Petrovich Larionov.
• In Neo Geo Battle Coliseum, one of Ai's attacks is a reference to Tetris.
• In the dance video game Pump It Up, in its version NX2 appears a song called "Pumptriss Quatro", due to the Korean composer Yahpp, which includes several songs Tetris, and the video of the song, are pieces of Tetris and the Russian dancing character.
• In the song “Katiuska First Fantasy”, in minute 5:49 you hear a melody very similar to the song Tetris.
• In Just Dance 2015 It's one of the eligible songs.
• He inspired the Tetris Rap of the industrialized rapper Porta.