Game History - Tetris Puzzle Game
Tetris is a tile-matching puzzle video game, originally designed and
programmed by Russian game designer Alexey Pajitnov. It was released on
June 6, 1984, while he was working for the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre
of the Academy of Science of the Soviet Union in Moscow. He derived its
name from the Greek numerical prefix tetra- (all of the game's pieces
contain four segments) and tennis, Pajitnov's favorite sport.
Tetris was the first entertainment software to be exported from the
Soviet Union to the US, where it was published by Spectrum HoloByte for
Commodore 64 and IBM PC. The Tetris game is a popular use of tetrominoes,
the four-element special case of polyominoes. Polyominoes have been used
in popular puzzles since at least 1907, and the name was given by the
mathematician Solomon W. Golomb in 1953. However, even the enumeration
of pentominoes is dated to antiquity.
The game (or one of its many variants) is available for nearly every
video game console and computer operating system, as well as on devices
such as graphing calculators, mobile phones, portable media players, PDAs,
Network music players and even as an Easter egg on non-media products like
oscilloscopes. It has even inspired Tetris serving dishes and been played
on the sides of various buildings.