Tetris Links Inspired by a pentominoes game he had bought earlier, Alexey Pazhitnov creates Tetris on an Electronica 60 at the Moscow Academy of Science's Computer Center. It is ported to the IBM PC by Vadim Gerasimov and starts spreading around Moscow. Pazhitnov gets a small degree of fame for his program. [quoted from this source] I think this video game is a good landmark example of one very fast self-replicating meme; it traveled faster than the original creators could catch it. Several companies ended up colliding with each other in a messy licensing battle caused mainly by an uncertainty for what permission was legitimate. This is a reoccuring story in emergently addicting video games. Introduced to America in the most widespread fashion in 1989 with Nintendo's release for their 8-bit original system, as well as making it the on-set cartridge for their new GameBoy. Tetris is now a heavily analyzed canonical "addictive game" example, most notibly talked about by Jeff Goldsmith in a Wired 2.05 article entitled This is your Brain on Tetris. The following is a quote from that article: The elevated GMR "high" is why you get wired after hours of play. Your old dog of a brain learns the Tetris trick by munching cerebral glucose. Neural hoop-jumping seems to be streamlined until performance peaks, and then your old dog stops craving Milkbones... The Tetris effect is a biochemical, reductionistic metaphor, if you will, for curiosity, invention, the creative urge. To fit shapes together is to organize, to build, to make deals, to fix, to understand, to fold sheets. All of our mental activities are analogous, each as potentially addictive as the next. [from Jeff Goldsmith] Alexey Pazhitnov made nearly no money from Tetris itself. ELORG made, then cancelled a deal that would have given him merchandising rights to Tetris. Still, Pazhitnov was happy that the game he created became famous world-wide, and he did get an 286-clone from the Academy as a reward; he also had a much nicer apartment than most of his colleagues. In 1996, with the financial backing of Henk Rogers, he organized The Tetris Company LLC, and is now finally getting royalties for his creation. [quoted from this source] Submitted
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