Tetris turned 25 years old

June 2 in Los Angeles, USA, will be the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the famous game Tetris. The solemn creator of the unique game, Aleksey Pajitnov, will arrive at the solemn ceremony. According to him, June 1984, when at the age of 29 he had the idea of ​​writing a program for Tetris, was “just a few moments ago.” “I was very attracted to all sorts of puzzles and puzzles. It was a kind of distraction from the main type of my activity, ”said Pajitnov

In the mid-80s, Alexey Pajitnov, an employee of the Computing Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences, dealing with artificial intelligence and speech recognition, decided to write a program for minicomputers that would constitute a puzzle game.

It was assumed that the new game will be an improved variation of the classic Pentomino Puzzle game he loves, in which flat figures of 12 different types, consisting of five tiny squares arranged in a wide variety of ways, had to be folded in a certain order until the given shape was obtained.
')
The first version of the game, written by Pajitnov, was a program capable of changing the position of the displayed figures by turning them 90 degrees relative to their geometric center.
However, while computer resources used throughout the USSR and abroad, did not allow to run such a program. Then the developer decided to simplify the task by removing one square from each of the figures, bringing their number to four. It was this innovation that later defined the name of the game - Tetris - derived from the Greek word tetra (four).

After the appearance of Tetris, several of the largest companies at the time for developing system software, computer and gaming applications - Spectrum Holobyte and Mirrorsoft, Bullet-Proof Software and Atari Games, Famicom and its American counterpart Nintendo Entertainment System - began a long struggle to acquire rights to release of all variations and console versions of Tetris.

In 1988, with the support of Henk Rogers (president of Bullet-Proof Software), Pajitnov organized a gaming software development company AnimaTek, and in 1991 Tetris was created. Five years later, Pajitnov moved to Microsoft, where he was involved in the creation and development of famous puzzles Pandora's Box. And in 2005, Alexey joined WildSnake Software, where he was supposed to start developing a new series of games for computers and game consoles. In March 2007, Pajitnov was awarded the Game Developers Choice Awards First Penguin Award.

He currently lives alternately in Moscow and in the American city of Seattle.

PS Download classic Tetris can, for example, here .