- A Soviet engineer designed it to have fun during his downtime at the office: his colleagues
They warned him that he was facing success. More than 500 thousand were made
Close your eyes. She goes back to her childhood, her adolescence or even her adult years. Whether it is a child or the uncle, the godmother, the father or mother who accompanies a child to have fun for a while in front of a console, a smartphone, or in the middle of one of those huge bustling rooms that made us happy and those who we will forever call them “fichines”, and who also allocates some pesos to their own entertainment.
Get your mind into a Sacoa. If you prefer the enormous basement of the pedestrian San Martín from Mar del Plata because it is the Sacoa that is happiest
made the Argentines and you are one of them, don’t hesitate: just pass.
And now, in front of almost any console from the last few decades, a high-end and also a low-end phone, or in the middle of the enormous video game room that your imagination prefers, listen to that song that your mind and your heart you already know. That song built from a Soviet popular melody, which accelerates as the minutes pass and which, in that acceleration, accompanies the acceleration of the falling pieces and their adrenaline, which is noticeable as the song progresses. game. That song that reminds you of a cartoon of a Russian dancer kicking folklore from one side to the other in a corner of the screen. That ti-tirirí-tirirí-tirirí that is inscribed in the global collective unconscious and that leaves no doubt: when it sounds it is because we are in front of a screen on which there is a game of Tetris ready for us.
Last Thursday marked forty years since the launch of the video game that, four decades after appearing timidly and without any faith on the part of its creator, became the one that, in all its versions, sold the most copies around the world. According to the most up-to-date figures from the Statista website, Tetris sold 520 million units, followed by Minecraft, launched in 2009 and with 300 million copies sold.
Tetris is one of those successes that crosses all the generations that have lived with the possibility of playing it and that also crosses a large number of countries in the world, especially since, through maneuvers far from legality, a Hungarian businessman pirated the invention of a Soviet computer engineer when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) still existed: that hack and the subsequent installation of Tetris on the Game Boy portable and individual console, in 1989, exported the game to almost the entire world. world.
But that expansion was still missing. First you have to locate yourself in an office of the Academy of Sciences that the Soviet Union had in Moscow. More specifically in the office of Alekséi Pázhitnov, a computer engineer who liked puzzles. He especially liked a board game, pentomino, which involves fitting geometric pieces into a wooden box, each made up of five squares. He thought he wanted something similar but to play on his computer during office downtime. And he got to work.
He programmed something similar to the pentomino and discovered that the figures made up of five squares each implied too much complexity, so he decided that each piece that would have to be arranged would be made up of four squares, that is, tetrominoes. The combination of that word and Pazhitnov’s fanaticism for tennis gave rise to the name of what he had just invented: Tetris.
The legend says that its creator had one afternoon to carry out this programming that revolutionized the world of entertainment, and experts say that there is nothing myth in that statement: the difficult thing, regarding the creation of Tetris, was having the idea. Carrying it out in terms of its digital design did not have major complications. So Pazhintov had the idea, put it into practice, and, not at all trusting in the impact of his creation beyond what he would have on his own daily life, he showed some co-workers what he had made. The result was immediate: everyone wanted to play, everyone played, everyone had fun, everyone told him that he had invented something great. Forty years later, there is no doubt: everyone was right.
The key to success: reflexes,
logic and strategy
“It is a very simple game and it is very easy to progress through its levels. On the other hand, it uses patterns that facilitate learning: you start very slowly, at a very simple level, and you improve a lot. That’s what makes you enjoy, seeing that you improve. The third factor is that it is a very peaceful game, there are no shots or blood, it is not violent, it gives you the impression of building something, not destroying it,” Pazhitnov described a few years ago when he was asked why his Tetris had turned out so well. successful.
The game challenges the player to, at increasing speed, arrange the tetrominoes that appear to complete entire rows without any gaps and thus make those rows disappear and leave room for new pieces. As the minutes pass, the speed accelerates and so does the rhythm of the music. What is tested, at the same time, is a certain quick resolution, even reflexes of whoever is playing, and also the possibility of building a strategy to arrange the pieces.
The simplicity of the game is perhaps one of the keys to its success over so many years. It is still played by people who discovered it almost half a century ago and still love it, and the little ones are starting to play it as they learn about its existence. It is not linked to any character or fashion that is too temporary and challenges three aspects that never fall into disuse: logic, reaction speed and strategy. A successful combo.
So successful that just a few months ago, in January, a professional Tetris player achieved for the first time something that no other human had achieved: “crash” the game, that is, “freeze” the game in what is considered the end of the game. videogame. He spent no more than 38 minutes, playing the version of Tetris designed for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), and said, stunned by the feat he had just achieved: “I can’t feel my fingers.” But perhaps the most relevant fact for this note regarding the record is that the person who achieved it, Willis Gibson, is only 13 years old. Confirmed: Tetris resists without
problems over time.
Pirate Popularity
For Tetris to reach a good part of the world – and become the best-selling video game in the world – it was not enough for Pazhintov to be inspired and surprise his office colleagues with his creation. In those years, the Soviet Union prohibited the patenting of inventions for private profit, so the computer engineer did not feel a great motivation to grow the scale of his invention.
However, a colleague of Pazhintov who also worked at the Academy of Sciences, managed to adapt the Tetris programming to the IBM PC and then, already distributed for free in Hungary, it was programmed for Commodore 64 and Apple II. It was Robert Stein, a Hungarian businessman, who tried to buy the rights to exploit Tetris after seeing it at a video game fair in his country. And although that negotiation did not progress, Stein managed to sell the idea (which he had stolen) to a British company and its American subsidiary.
In 1987, Tetris was sold in Europe and the United States with a legend that said: “Made in America, created abroad.” Two years later, the launch of the Game Boy portable and individual console would be the definitive consecration of the game created in Moscow, after the Nintendo company bought its exploitation rights. It would be difficult to go through the world without having any idea what those pieces were that were falling non-stop and that had to be put in order to survive.
Playing Tetris is very good
What Pazhintov invented to have some fun and which became a mass phenomenon is also, according to various scientific research, a habit that can bring benefits to those who practice it.
The first research carried out on Tetris detected, by measuring glucose levels, that sustaining the habit of playing it can lead to more efficient activity during the game. But in addition, this same analysis determined that practicing half an hour of Tetris per day for at least three months increases cognitive functions such as reasoning, language processing and critical thinking, while increasing the thickness of the cerebral cortex.
Around 2009, a team at the University of Oxford led by Dr. Emily Holmes investigated the effects of sustained Tetris practice on people who had recently been exposed to traumatic experiences or materials. The team detected that this sustained practice managed to reduce the number of flashbacks to those traumatic scenes suffered by those who had been exposed. In people diagnosed with post-traumatic stress, they found that playing Tetris once a week for 25 minutes and for several weeks reduced the appearance of these flashbacks, and they confirmed that the closer the game practice was to the traumatic experience, the better the results. results.
In 2013, research led by Robert Hess determined that playing Tetris helps adolescents who suffer from amblyopia (also called “lazy eye”). According to Hess, who carried out the research in Canada, the visual concentration required by the game trains the eye more effectively than patching the “non-lazy” eye.
One that we all play
Close your eyes. He goes back to the Sacoa he prefers, or the Game Boy, or the console on which he still plays Tetris, perhaps enhancing his cognitive functions even without knowing it. Even if you are facing an individual game, know that you are not alone in front of all those pieces that fall to the rhythm of that unforgettable melody based on the Russian popular song Korobeiniki.
Just counting the copies that were sold – and not those that were pirated, those that were downloaded for free, those that were played online – there are more than 500 million Tetris users: as if the Argentine population had multiplied by ten. The video game was the first to be played in outer space and the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) exhibits the original Tetris designed by Pazhitnov.
It is full of people like you, who listen to the melody and prepare their fingers to rotate the pieces, faster and faster, using pure reflexes and logic. For four decades and with no signs of its popularity declining.
By Julieta Roffo
Infobae
