Тетрис!

I have to say this is one of my favorite games of all time! Now, if you haven't played Tetris you didn't have a real childhood and so you're obligated to read this post.

So let's start from the basics. Tetris was created by Alexei Leonidovich Pazhitnov (Алексей Леонидович Пажитнов) in 1985 on a system he was working on called the Elektronika 60. The name Tetris combines the Greek prefix tetra- (because each game piece has four blocks) with the word tennis. Pazhitnov's friend, Vadim Gerasimov, transferred it to an IBM computer system and Tetris became an instant hit in Moscow. Unfortunately, once it got out of The Soviet Union lawsuits ensued as companies bought and sold rights without Pazhitnov's permission. But we don't really care about that, because the important thing is that it made it to the United States in 1986 and now we all get to play it.
The concept and the gameplay is extremely simple except when you start getting to the higher levels. The pieces you play with are called tetrominoes or tetrads.

They fall down from the top of the screen and the player has to move them to create a horizontal line with no spaces on the bottom of the screen. Once you do that, they disappear and you get points. The higher your score, the higher the level, and the faster the pieces fall.

Now, my blog would be incomplete if I did not have a YouTube video posted, so here you go:


Watch out though, because if you play for too long you could get Tetris Syndrome or repetitive stress symptoms where you begin to see tetris pieces even when you're not playing the game. So don't be like this kid:


And of course, Tetris has become popular all over the world and has inspired people to create shows like this:
The actual name of this show in Japan is Brain Wall, but people call it Human Tetris