A to Z Challenge: Tetris

The weird thing about video games is the least complicated games can also be the most fun.  The original Pong was just two rectangles and a square "ball" and people played it for hours or maybe even days thanks in part to the novelty.

Another great example of this is the classic game Tetris.  It's a Russian puzzle game with a catchy theme song that became an instant classic on the NES and Gameboy and because of its simplicity has managed to stay relevant in the smartphone era.

The rules of Tetris are pretty simple:  there are puzzle pieces that fall into a rectangular chute.  You can turn the falling pieces to fit together to fill rows of the chute.  Once a row is filled it disappears and everything above that moves down.  If you're lucky you can get rid of up to 4 rows at the same time.  

The challenge is the pieces will come faster and sometimes new pieces are added.  One little mistake when the pieces are coming fast and furious can start a chain reaction that leads to disaster.  Once the pieces get so backed up that new ones can't be added, the game is over.

Last year there was a movie about the guy who created Tetris back in Soviet-era Russia.  I haven't seen it since it's an Apple movie.  Anyway, the game was and remains to be hugely popular.

While I don't think there was an Atari version to play in the 80s, it came out for the NES, though we never had it.  But later I think maybe we had it or some version of it on the PC.  There have been plenty of sequels and different versions of it for just about every platform.

Mostly I played it for hours on a not-really-smartphone back in the late 2000s, almost up to 2013 or so.  Since that phone wasn't too smart, there weren't a lot of games you could play, so Tetris was one of the few that worked well.  I got over 50 levels completed a few times, but obviously that's not as much as some really good players can do.

There are probably tournaments and all that stuff for the really great players.  It's a testament to the game's simple yet addicting design that it remains circulating about 40 years later.  Like Super Mario, I have the Tetris theme song on an album by the London Philharmonic, which can really get stuck in my head.  I'm hearing it right now!  Maybe you are too.