Tetris

Tetris
Designer(s)	Alexey Pajitnov
Platform(s)	List of Tetris variants
Release	DOS USSR: 1985 UK: January 27, 1988 US: January 29, 1988
Genre(s)	Puzzle
Mode(s)	Single-player multiplayer

Tetris (Russian: Тетрис)^[a] is a puzzle video game created in 1985 by Alexey Pajitnov, a Soviet software engineer. In Tetris, falling tetromino shapes must be neatly sorted into a pile; once a horizontal line of the game board is filled in, it disappears, granting points and preventing the pile from overflowing. Over 200 versions of Tetris have been published by numerous companies on more than 65 platforms, often with altered game mechanics, some of which have become standard over time. To date, these versions of Tetris collectively serve as the second-best-selling video game series with over 520 million sales, mostly on mobile devices.

In the 1980s, Pajitnov worked for the Computing Center of the Academy of Sciences, where he programmed Tetris on the Elektronika 60 and adapted it to the IBM PC with the help of Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov. Floppy disk copies were distributed freely throughout Moscow, before spreading to Eastern Europe. Robert Stein of Andromeda Software licensed Tetris to Mirrorsoft in the UK and Spectrum HoloByte in the US. Both companies released the game in 1988 to commercial success and sold licenses to other companies, including Henk Rogers' Bullet-Proof Software. Rogers negotiated with Elektronorgtechnica, the state-owned organization in charge of licensing Soviet software, to license Tetris to Nintendo for the Game Boy and Nintendo Entertainment System (NES); both versions were released in 1989. With 35 million sales to date, the Game Boy version became the best-selling version of Tetris and among the best-selling video games of all time; its success popularized both the console and the game overall. In 1996, after the rights reverted to Pajitnov, he and Rogers formed the Tetris Company to manage licensing.

Tetris is frequently cited as one of the greatest and most influential games ever made, being among the inaugural class of games inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2015. It is an early example of a casual game and has been influential in the genre of puzzle video games and popular culture, being represented in a vast array of media such as architecture and art. Tetris has also been the subject of academic research, including studies of its potential for psychological intervention. A competitive culture has formed around the game, particularly the NES version, with players – typically adolescents – competing at the annual Classic Tetris World Championship. A film dramatization of the game's development was released in 2023.
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