Curiosities about Tetris

For many gamers in their thirties like us, Tetris was the game that introduced us to the world of video games and, surely, one of the few that was accepted by our parents' generation.

Although it is possibly one of the most popular games, we are sure that there are curiosities about Tetris that you do not know.

Born in 1984, its legend ended with 3.5 million copies sold on December 31, 2014. Tetris was developed by the Soviet Alexey Pajitnov with the purpose of testing the calculation capacity of computers. The name Tetris comes from the Greek tetra, meaning four, and refers to the number of squares that make up the pieces. A simple way of naming the game that would end up becoming the most emblematic game in history.

Did you know that Tetris blocks have names? The first versions of the game lacked color, so how could players recognize one shape or another? The solution they developed was easy, assigning the blocks a letter of the alphabet with a similar shape. In this way, they were divided into I, O, L, J, S, Z, and T.

We cannot talk about Tetris without mentioning Gameboy. In 1989, before its release, the fight for the Tetris license was very close between Nintendo and SEGA. In the end, it was Nintendo who won it, and Tetris greatly boosted Gameboy's early success. If SEGA had won this fight, we might not have known most of today's Nintendo games.

Another curious fact about the game's popularity was that some experienced players started seeing Tetris blocks in real life. This disorder was baptized with the Tetris syndrome, and well, at least it was useful for organizing the closet or packing the suitcases.

Jokes aside, nowadays almost nobody plays Tetris anymore and the younger ones probably don't even know it, but we will always remember that joy when you got a vertical "I" bar that allowed you to clear several accumulated lines.