While being employed by the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Alexey Pajitnov made gaming history on June 6 1984. He had created a modest little game which will be played by people of all ages and gender from all around the world. Welcome to Tetris mania. With such popularity, it is no wonder that the impact of Tetris on popular culture reaches far and wide.
The success of this video game is due to its simplistic game play which is both easy to master and very addictive. There are seven different falling blocks of varying shapes called Tetrominoes. They are named after the letters they resemble: I, J, L, O, S, T and Z.
Tetrominoes have truly attained iconic status when in 2007, an L-shaped tetromino was entered as a joke into GameFAQs’ 6th annual Character Battle and surprisingly, won the contest. This is an event in which the users of the site nominate their favourite video game character who then participate in a popularity contest.
Hirokazu Tanaka is widely known as the creator of the music to Game Boy versions of this popular game. He mainly made musical arrangements from other composer’s melodies. Music A from the game is probably the most recognizable of all the tunes from the game. It is basically an instrumental rendition of Korobeiniki, a Russian folk song. Many people will recognize the tune in the movie Snatch, as the theme for “Boris the Blade”. It is also used on television as the opening theme to Borat Segdiyev (a character created by Sacha Baron Cohen).
Korobeiniki is also very popular with musicians who love to reference or cover this tune because of its distinctiveness. An interesting rendition is by Pig With the Face of A Boy, a London “neo-post-post-music hall anti-folk band”. They released “A Complete History of the Soviet Union as Told by a Humble Worker, Arranged to the Melody of Tetris” in 2009.
Recently, there are many movies released that are adapted from video games. Black20.com, an online entity that produces digital shorts, viral videos and web series also jumped on the bandwagon, creating their own mock movie trailer called Tetris – The Movie in April 2008. A spoof of the video game movie genre, the trailer follows the trials of young men and women who are forced to engage in death fights flying air crafts shaped as tetrominoes.
Meanwhile in TV land, footage of Brain Wall, a segment of a Japanese game show inspired by the block stacking game, proliferated on video sharing sites, and was dubbed “Human Tetris” by viewers. The game pits human contestants against a giant foam wall with an odd shape cut out of it. The wall moves towards the contestants who need to form a shape that will pass through the hole successfully. International versions were eventually released in over 20 countries by FremantleMedia as Hole in the Wall.
This modest game has been featured in different areas of media, and is so entrenched in the popular imagination that a quilt pattern for a Tetris quilt was even featured on the Quilter Geek Blog. The impact of Tetris on popular culture cannot be ignored, and the enduring popularity of this game will mean that the game will be played by many more generations of gamers.
Playing Tetris online is a great way to unwind. There are many different versions of the game and many free Tetris websites if you look around the web.