When a horizontal line was completed, it disappeared and the stacked figures dropped down one position. The user had to choose the rotation of the game pieces and where they should fall.
The concept was very simple: a player moved the pieces on the screen using the cursors and fit them together, where they ended up accumulating at the bottom. Its name, Pajitnov’s idea, comes from the joining of two words: “tetromino”, a geometric shape composed of four equal squares, connected orthogonally, and “tennis”, the favourite sport of the Russian engineer. The user has to choose the rotation of the game pieces and where they have to fall. The first version was followed by countless editions. Together with his partner, engineer Dmitry Pavlovsky, and a very young Vadim Gerasimov, who discovered the centre during a school visit, they launched what would become one of the best-known video games in the world. The idea of the game came to Alexey Pajitnov, a computer engineer from the Computer Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It was the first “Soviet” product many people in the West were exposed to,” says journalist Dan Ackerman, author of the book The Tetris Effect (2016), in a conversation with OpenMind. “Tetris also has a place in history for being an important part of the thawing of the Cold War. Its ability to please both adults and children has had a big influence on today’s games, which also employ visual-spatial processing, beneficial for the brain. On June 6, 1984, Tetris was released, a game created by Russian computer scientists, took the leap from the Soviet Union and became one of the most universal videogames.
At the height of the Cold War, simple geometric figures were able to overcome the iron curtain drawn between East and West.
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