Almost all sources on the net point to June 1985 or around 1985. My bet is that atarihq.com's article on the history of Tetris is the origin. That article has been around for a long time. Other sources like BBC's documentary says spring of 1985. I'll have to see what Game Over says later, but I don't have access to that book right this moment. Anyway, the reason why I bring this up is because I always thought it was weird that tetris.com's timeline puts Tetris's birth date in 1984. I didn't think much of it until just yesterday I was reading an interview with Henk Rogers which states "Rogers is planning something special for Tetris' 25th anniversary later this year." Later this year is 2009, and 2009 minus 25 is 1984. Did BBC mean spring of 1984? Have we all been getting it wrong all these years? What do you guys think? Any leads?
A reasonable explanation would be that tetris was made/started in 1984 and then release in june of 1985. Basing off the interview I would think that the author would say something like "next month" instead of "later this year" since june is only a month away. Kinda off topic but I am interested to hear more about "The Tetris Cup" he mentions. I searched for it and only found an article on how they had a Tetris Cup at the university of Hawaii (here) http://media.www.kaleo.org/media/storag ... 3338.shtml other than that nothing
I've wondered about this as well. I don't have an answer but I can say that: This is a poorly written plagiarised version of the Game Over book. So it's a tertiary source, and you can safely ignore it.
from Vadim Gerasimov's web site: this doesn't imply that the original idea didn't come before that. it only means that this is the time period in which the three were working together on it. but reading further... ok, so the idea came after Gerasimov started working with Pajitnov. therefore Gerasimov knows exactly when the game was originally conceived (1985). is this what Pajitnov considers to be the beginning of tetris?
It's in the news that the 25th anniversary is this week. I wonder if he even remembers the exact day he invented Tetris.
From the article: Does any regular of this board live in the New York City area? If so, let's ask the bar owner if he wants to upgrade to Ti
hi guys, here's a little salute to Tetris that google is doing for the 25 years of Tetris. Currently, google.co.jp is the only region that updated it. It should hit N.A. shortly. http://www.google.co.jp
That Google image is awesome! I just turned 32 on Saturday, so I guess I'm 7 years and 7 days older than Tetris. Hard to believe Tetris was created all the way back when I was in Grade 1.
Wow, the Japanese Wikipedia article on Tetris is quite a bit longer than the English one. Too bad we're not on the first page of Google results for "tetris", or we'd be getting a lot of new visitors tomorrow. As it stands, perhaps a few will come through Tetris Friends, which is currently number three.
It amuses me that The TetriSCOmpany hasn't finished sweeping Google's top ten results for its own trademark. Result 2 and result 8 are copies of old, pre-sell-out N-Blox. In fact, counting Tetris.com (#1), Tetris Friends (#3), and Neave.com (#4), which have the post-sell-out version, fully half of the top ten results seen from a U.S. IP address link to N-Blox.
"Wow, the Japanese Wikipedia article on Tetris is quite a bit longer than the English one." Are you sure? The English article is 53.5 KB and the Japanese article is 50.8 KB.
I can elaborate, since I participated in it. (Didn't make the bracket, though - mainly since I didn't realize it'd be better strategically to do all t-spins rather than go for a faster time chaining B2B tetrises) The tournament consisted of two divisions, solo and team. In either case, qualification was necessary to "seed" the participants, and the sixteen highest scores (or team scores, which is basically adding each teammate's best score) were in the bracket. Teams consisted of four players each, though in the competition, only three players actually competed. Teams were allowed to swap players between matches. (Between games in a match, I'm not sure, but that might have been allowed too) The Qualifier Qualification ran for six days (non-consecutive), generally running around lunch time. (10am to 2pm if memory serves me right) On a qualification day, you would walk in, sign in (assuming you registered on the tournament website), and get one try to achieve a high score. Games were played on level 1, height 0, line clear mode. Restarting would effectively void your attempt for that day. Scoring Scoring consisted of two parts - your in-game score, and a 'time bonus'. When you started your round, they started a stopwatch to keep track of your time. (Tetris DS didn't have an in-game clock, so this was necessary) The time bonus effectively worked something like, they set an upper cap on time at around 2 minutes, 40 seconds. For each 10 seconds you finished under that cap, you was awarded 1,000 points. (Your time bonus is always a multiple of 1k) This was added to your in-game score to get your 'qualifying score'. Your best score from any of the qualifier rounds determined your ranking. Tournament Day Top 16 people formed the bracket. First two rounds were single elimination - leaving a 'final four'. Each of the final four players played two games to determine first, second, and third rankings. Only top three people won for each division. Team division was played in the same way. There was also a monitor hooked up to one of the DS's to show each player's in-game screen. Prizes Trying to recall... Solo: 1st - $1,000 travel certificate 2nd - A big screen TV (42", i think) 3rd - iPod touch (or whatever the one that looks like an iPhone is) Team: 1st - Four nintendo Wii consoles (one for each teammate) 2nd - 3rd - (Yea, sorry, I forgot what 2nd and 3rd were. I think one of them was a $100 gift card to somewhere, but forget where, for each person) Unfortunately, tetriscup.com (the site that was used at that time) is now defunct, so I kinda have to rely off of my memory to remember most of this.
