Tetris — how a game of logic took over our minds
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When the moving van arrived, I realised I had underestimated how much stuff I had. There was no way my teetering pile of possessions was going to fit into the empty vehicle before me. Then, just when I needed it, a solution bubbled up from my subconscious — Tetris. Each item of furniture became a simple geometric shape. I noticed how one bed might stack squarely on top of the other. The chest of drawers, rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise, would fit snugly in the corner under the desk. Those childhood hours spent arranging blocks on a two-inch screen had finally amounted to something useful.
I am not the first to experience what psychologists call “the Tetris effect”, where a player sees those familiar blocks intrude in their real life, hallucinated across supermarket shelves and urban skylines. This phenomenon also gave its name to a 2018 game which injects the classic formula with a synaesthetic twist. Co-produced by beloved music game creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi, Tetris Effect registers each of your movements with a musical cue, so you build its soundtrack as holographic dolphins dance around the grid.
Even with these audiovisual innovations, the most notable thing about Tetris Effect is how little it needs to change the game’s core challenge. Tetris was created 37 years ago, has been released on more than 65 platforms, sold over 495m copies, and is the model for every casual game which dominates the app store today. What has made it so enduring?
You understand Tetris in seconds. Colourful blocks, called tetrominoes, fall from the top of the screen and must be arranged at the bottom. Complete a line and they disappear, freeing up space. Clear four lines at once using a long, straight block and you get extra points — this move is actually called “Tetris”. Keep playing and the blocks fall ever faster until the screen fills to the brim and you fail. Somewhat poignantly, you can’t actually win Tetris: it’s simply a question of how long you can hold on before you lose.
The game was invented in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov, a software engineer at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Its name is a combination of the Greek word “tetra” — the four squares comprising each tetromino — and tennis, Pajitnov’s favourite sport. Despite success in Moscow, he struggled to export the game since intellectual property was complicated in the Soviet Union — all his research belonged to the state. This didn’t stop a British salesman discovering the game in Hungary and drafting a spurious licensing deal. Before long the game was selling like hot cakes in the west, unbeknown to Pajitnov. Publishers in the US used the game’s Russian origins as a selling point, with one edition bearing the subtitle: “The Soviet Mind Game”. There followed a volley of licensing disputes, culminating in a court victory for Nintendo, which then took Tetris stratospheric by selling it alongside its new portable console, the Game Boy.
In 1996, the rights reverted to Pajitnov, who founded the Tetris Company in order to manage the game’s licence in future iterations. This litigious organisation has furiously flogged the brand: as of 2015, there were more than 215 official variants of Tetris, some including multiplayer features, magical abilities and storylines about sentient tetrominoes leaving their home planet for pastures new. Last month a board game was released, and a film is in the works for Apple TV Plus, which dramatises the game’s troubled history.
A 2011 documentary called Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters introduced the world to competitive Tetris. Watching footage online provides insight into a fascinating subculture: see how the enthusiastic commentators call competitors sweetly by their first names, or how the old guard — who have been playing since the 1980s — were recently swept away by a new wave of teenage players who have pioneered a novel technique for holding the controller, known as “rolling”, by drumming their fingers on its underside to achieve unprecedented speeds of 20 button-presses per second.
The game’s outsized influence is fundamentally down to its elegant design, which is simple to learn but challenging to master. It has been proven to improve cognition, treat lazy eyes and even reduce the effects of PTSD. It calms us because, in a world of games about destruction, Tetris asks us to create order from chaos. It has no narration, no character for the player to control. “It was so abstract,” Pajitnov said in an interview, “that was its great quality. It appealed to everybody.”
Tetris was the first masterpiece that could never have been anything other than a video game. Despite having no storyline, it speaks a language of logic, suggesting how we might hold on in a world where nothing is stable. With quick wits, practised reflexes and a dash of luck, we can keep going for a while yet, until the final block falls.