A recent NPR report celebrated the 35th year since the birth of Russian computer programmer Alexey Pajitnov’s side project, which was to become one of the biggest selling home vid games of all time – and a pretty good coin-op upright from Atari as well. You guessed it, the game was and is Tetris, one of the more addictive videos ever to appear.
Gameplay, according to NPR, runs as follows: “Seven brightly-colored four-block pieces fall from the top of the screen … slowly at first and then faster and faster as the player rotates them to create complete lines. When they do, the line vanishes. When they don’t, the blocks begin to stack on top of one another until they fill the screen and it’s game over.”
Around 170 million copies have been sold to date around the world in all sorts of configurations, coin-op included, we assume. “It was and continues to be a commercial juggernaut that has touched the lives of hundreds of millions of players,” NPR declared.