Admirers of the classic game "Tetris" have already celebrated its quarter-century anniversary. The favorite game of millions of people around the world was created by Russian programmer Alexei Pajitnov back in June 1984. Since then, not only computer owners have been ill with Tetris - the ageless fun has found a new life on the screens of mobile phones and tablets.
The jubilee of "Tetris", oddly enough, was not celebrated in Russia - Alexey Pajitnov now lives in the United States, so the identity took place in Los Angeles. The developer attended them in person. In his speech, he admitted that the time when he got the idea to write "Tetris" was "quite recently, it seems, just a few moments ago."
In 1984, Soviet programmers were armed with bulky computers with monochrome screens. The same equipment was in the computer center of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where a young 29-year-old engineer Aleksey Pozhitnov worked. In the course of his work, he studied artificial intelligence, and he came up with the idea of writing a puzzle game.
Taking as a basis the game of pentomino, in which the player was required to correctly position the geometric figures falling from top to bottom, Alexey wrote a visualization program on the screen of this children's amusement. The pentomino box was transformed into a "glass" in which the rows filled with completely falling figures were removed. The task of the person sitting at the monitor screen was to leave the "glass" empty for as long as possible, preventing the incompletely filled layers from reaching the top.
The resources of computers made it possible to manipulate and rotate only geometric figures, consisting of a maximum of 4 squares, by 90 degrees. Therefore, the game got the name "Tetris", from the Greek word tetra - four.
The game quickly became popular in those organizations that had a park of computers, these were mainly Soviet research institutes. Their specificity was such that the employees of the computing halls had a lot of time that could be devoted to improving the skills of filling the "glass". Whole tournaments were held, because Soviet engineers received their salaries regardless of their output.
The circulation of the game was at least several tens of a million copies, but its developer himself did not receive a dime from this: Soviet legislation did not provide for this kind of remuneration for copyright. At the first opportunity, as soon as the “iron curtain was opened, Pozhitnov left for the United States, where he was already expected and gladly provided citizenship and work. Indeed, by that time, several American companies had already fought a fierce struggle to acquire the rights to release Tetris, from which several more of their console versions had already been generated.
In 1988 Pajitnov, with the support of his American partners, began developing game software, and in 1991 he opened his own company, which he named after his famous puzzle. Now Alexey, who was awarded the Game Developers Choice Awards First Penguin Award in the United States, lives in Seattle, but more and more often appears in Moscow.
