A pair of cool retro cufflinks.
Tetris (
Russian: Те́трис, pronounced
[ˈtɛtrʲɪs]) is a
tile-matching puzzle video game, originally designed and programmed by Russian game designer
Alexey Pajitnov. It was released on June 6, 1984,
[1] while he was working for the
Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the
Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow.
[2] He derived its name from the Greek numerical prefix
tetra- (all of the game's pieces contain four segments) and
tennis, Pajitnov's favorite sport.
[3][4]
Tetris was the first entertainment software to be exported from the USSR to the US, where it was published by
Spectrum HoloByte for
Commodore 64 and IBM PC. The
Tetris game is a popular use of
tetrominoes, the four-element special case of
polyominoes. Polyominoes have been used in popular puzzles since at least 1907, and the name was given by the mathematician
Solomon W. Golomb in 1953. However, even the enumeration of pentominoes is dated to antiquity.
The game (or one of its many variants) is available for nearly every
video game console and computer
operating system, as well as on devices such as
graphing calculators, mobile phones,
portable media players,
PDAs,
Network music players and even as an
Easter egg on non-media products like
oscilloscopes.
[5] It has even inspired
Tetris serving dishes
[6] and been played on the sides of various buildings.
[7]