Back Tetris Afrikaans ቴትሪስ Amharic Tetris AN تتريس Arabic Tetris AST Tetris Azerbaijani Tétris BAN Тэтрыс Byelorussian Тэтрыс BE-X-OLD Тетрис Bulgarian
| Tetris | |
|---|---|
 A typical Tetris game screen | |
| Designer(s) | Alexey Pajitnov |
| Platform(s) | List of Tetris variants |
| Release | DOS |
| Genre(s) | |
| Mode(s) | |
Tetris (Russian: Тетрис[a]) is a puzzle video game created in 1985 by Alexey Pajitnov, a Soviet software engineer. In Tetris, players complete lines by moving tetrominoes, which descend onto the playing field. The completed lines disappear and grant the player points, and the player can proceed to fill the vacated spaces. Though the core gameplay has remained consistent, specific game mechanics between different Tetris variants have differed, with some changes becoming standard overtime. Versions have been released for personal computers (PC), consoles, and mobile platforms.
In the 1980s, Pajitnov worked for the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center of the Academy of Sciences, where he programmed Tetris on the Electronika 60 and adapted it to the IBM PC with the help of colleague Dmitry Pavlovsky and young computer prodigy Vadim Gerasimov, with floppy disk copies being distributed freely throughout Moscow, before spreading to Eastern Europe. After salesman Robert Stein of Andromeda Software discovered the game and communicated with the Academy and Pajitnov his interest in selling it, he licensed it to Mirrorsoft in the United Kingdom and Spectrum HoloByte in the United States. Both companies commercially released the game in January 1988 to commercial success and sold licenses to other companies, including Henk Rogers's Bullet-Proof Software. Rogers negotiated a deal with Elektronorgtechnica (Elorg), the state-owned organization in charge of licensing Soviet software, to license the game to Nintendo for the Game Boy and Nintendo Entertainment System (NES); both versions released in 1989.
The Game Boy version became the best-selling individual version of Tetris and one of the best-selling video games of all time with 35 million sales. It also popularized both the Game Boy and Tetris. In 1996, after the rights to Tetris reverted to Pajitnov from Elorg, Pajitnov and Rogers formed The Tetris Company to manage licensing of official versions of Tetris. Over 200 versions of the game have been published by several companies on more than 65 platforms, setting a Guinness world record for the most ports and variants. To date, Tetris and its variants collectively serve as the second-best-selling video game franchise of all time, with over 520 million sales, a majority of which originate from mobile sales.
Tetris has been influential in the genre of puzzle video games and popular culture as a whole, being considered an early example of a casual games and represented in vast array of media such architecture and art. The game has been the subject of academic research, including studies of its potential for psychological intervention. A competitive scene has formed around Tetris, particularly the NES version, following the inaugural Classic Tetris World Championship in 2010. It is often ranked among the greatest video games and was among the inaugural class of video games inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2015. A film adaptation of the game's background was released in 2023 on Apple TV+ to positive reviews and high viewership.
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