Tetris is 25 years old

On June 2, Los Angeles, USA, will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the famous Tetris game. The creator of a unique game, Alexey Pazhitnov, will come to the ceremony . According to him, in June 1984, when he, at the age of 29, started to write the program for Tetris, he was “only a few moments ago”. “I was very attracted to all kinds of puzzles and puzzles. This was a kind of distraction from my main activity, ”said Pazhitnov.

In the mid-80s, Alexey Pazhitnov, an employee of the Computing Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences, who worked on problems of artificial intelligence and speech recognition, decided to write a program for minicomputers that would be a game a puzzle.

It was assumed that the new game would be an improved variation of his classic Pentomino Puzzle game, in which flat shapes of 12 different types, consisting of five tiny squares arranged in a wide variety of images, had to be folded in a certain order until a given shape was obtained.

The first version of the game, written by Pazhitnov, was a program that can change the position of the displayed figures by rotating them 90 degrees relative to their geometric center.
However, at that time, computer resources used everywhere in the USSR and abroad did not allow such a program to be launched. Then the developer decided to simplify the task by removing from each of the figures one square that makes them up, bringing their number to four. It was this innovation that subsequently determined the name of the game - Tetris, - the word tetra (four) derived from the Greek.

After the advent of Tetris, several of the largest companies for the development of 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 for the acquisition of 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 the AnimaTek game software company, and in 1991 Tetris was created. Five years later, Pajitnov moved to Microsoft, where he was engaged in the creation and development of well-known puzzles Pandora's Box (Pandora's Box). And already 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 resides alternately in Moscow and in the American city of Seattle.

PS You can download classic Tetris here , for example .