Falling bricks

The original classic game, Tetris, with authetic computer sounds.

What I call the "falling bricks" game. The purpose is to maneuver the different shaped bricks, as they fall down slowly, so that a single row of bricks is formed and then deleted. You are awarded points for every row deleted, accompanied by some music. If you happen to delete two or more rows of falling bricks at once, then the points awarded increase.

As the game progresses to different levels, the speed of the falling bricks increases, making it more challenging to maneuver them in time. The incomplete rows of bricks pile up at the bottom leaving less room to maneuver the falling bricks—when the pile of incomplete rows reaches the top of the playing screen the game ends.

Modern versions of Tetris come with jazzed up graphics, pretty colours, and a variety of music. But the original Tetris, created by Russian students, had only simple computer sounds. Check their website for the download of the classic Tetris:


Vadim Gerasimov

Tetris is a popular game developed in 1985-86 by Alexey Pajitnov (Pazhitnov), Dmitry Pavlovsky, and me. Pajitnov and Pavlovsky were computer engineers at the Computer Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences. I was a 16-year-old high school student.

Our plan was to make about a dozen addictive computer games for the PC and put them together in one system we called a computer funfair. Pajitnov and Pavlovsky also thought about selling the games. The selling part seemed unusual and difficult because we lived in the Soviet Union. Making and selling something privately was highly irregular. We focused on making development tools for the PC, converting earlier games to the PC, and developing new game ideas.

A few months after we started working together, Pajitnov came up with the Tetris idea. Before we met he had a computer game called Genetic Engineering. In that game the player had to move the 4-square pieces (tetramino) around the screen using cursor keys. The player could assemble various shapes. I don't remember the exact objective of that game, but it seemed rather dull.

At one of our meetings Pajitnov told Pavlovsky and me about his new idea of tetramino falling into a rectangular glass and piling up at the bottom. He believed the game might be successful.

The game name "Tetris" was purely Alexey's idea. The word is a combination of "tetramino" and "tennis".

So the "falling bricks" are called tetramino! Live and learn.