Tetris

1984 tile-matching puzzle video game series

Original description from the source, not translated.

YEAR 1984

GENRE Puzzle

PLATFORM Android, Sega Genesis, ZX Spectrum, Mac operating system, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, Nintendo Entertainment System, NEC PC-9800 series, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Acorn Electron, Amstrad CPC, Amstrad PCW, Atari ST, Atari Falcon, MSX, Philips CD-i, WonderSwan Color, Apple IIGS, MOTO Gamme, Nintendo Switch

ABOUT THE GAME

Tetris (Russian: Тетрис) is a puzzle video game created by Alexey Pajitnov, a Soviet software engineer, in the mid-1980s. In Tetris, falling pieces consisting of four connected blocks, known as tetrominoes, must be sorted into a pile. Once a horizontal line of the playfield is filled with blocks, the line disappears, granting points and preventing the pile from reaching the top. The objective is to score as much points as possible before the game ends when the blocks do reach the top. This gameplay has been used in approximately 220 versions across at least 70 platforms. Newer versions frequently add game mechanics, some of which have become standard over time, such as the mechanic of "holding" a tetromino for later use. In the mid-1980s, Pajitnov created Tetris in his spare time while working at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center of the Academy of Sciences. He initially programmed it in Pascal for the Elektronika 60 in about three weeks, then spent over two months porting it to the IBM PC using Turbo Pascal with help from Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov. Floppy disk copies were distributed freely throughout Moscow before spreading to Eastern Europe. Robert Stein of Andromeda Software saw Tetris in Hungary and contacted the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center to secure a license to release it commercially. Stein sublicensed it to Mirrorsoft in the UK and Spectrum HoloByte in the US. Both companies released Tetris in 1988 to commercial success and sublicensed to additional companies, including Henk Rogers' Bullet-Proof Software. Rogers negotiated with Elektronorgtechnica, the state-owned organization in charge of licensing Soviet software, to license Tetris to Nintendo for the Game Boy and Nintendo Entertainment System (NES); both versions were released in 1989. The Game Boy release contributed to its console's success and popularized Tetris. To date, it is the best-selling version of Tetris, with over 35 million sales.

Source: Wikipedia CC BY-SA 4.0 — Tetris · retrieved October 19, 2026

Text is shortened from the original article; the full version is linked.

PROVENANCE

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