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Tetris
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Tetris DX (1998) is a Game Boy Color game that is backwardly compatible with the original Game Boy. It features battery-saved high scores and three player profiles. DX ... has a new single-player mode, which is against the CPU. DX also features two new modes of play. In "Ultra Mode," players must accumulate as many points as possible within a three-minute time period. In "40 Lines," players are timed on how quickly they can clear 40 lines of play.
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The original author of Tetris was Alexey Pajitnov (Pazhitnov), assisted by Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov. Computer engineers, Alexey Pajitnov and Dmitry Pavlovsky worked together at the Computer Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Alexey Pajitnov had already published and sold several psychology based games. Dmitry Pavlovsky had written computer games for mainframes. High school student, Vadim Gerasimov (only sixteen at the time) had just written a directory encryption program for MS DOS when he introduced to the pair. It was Alexey Pajitnov who first conceived of the game Tetris based on another game of his called Genetic Engineering.
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A member of Computer Gaming World’s Hall of Fame, Tetris may have gained many fans on home computers and video game consoles during the mid-to-late 1980s, but it exploded in popularity when it was packaged with Nintendo’s original Game Boy. Updated for the new era of portable gaming, Tetris on the iPod features beautiful color graphics, complementary sound effects, and an engaging musical soundtrack that’s an update of the original Tetris theme.
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Though the game outdates the Game Boy by a couple of years, Tetris is always going to be synonymous with Nintendo's handheld. Whether the original Game Boy has Tetris to thank for the system's success, or Tetris has the original Game Boy to thank for the game's success is a debate left to the ages. But the two went hand-in-hand back in 1989 and the rest is history. The game design was incredibly simple in concept: stack "tetriminos" (clusters of four tiles) into a pile at the bottom of the bin - form a solid line from left to right and those tiles disappear with the rest of the pile settling into the bin. The strategy is a balance between mind and action, as the idea is to sustain an empty bin by stacking pieces without making gaps in the stack. Even with such a simple concept in place, the game has the ability to really grab and hang on even when all you're doing is the same action over and over again.
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A few months after Tetris started sneaking around the world, Robert Stein, CEO of the British software company Andromeda was vacationing in Budapest. He first laid eyes on the Apple II and Commodore-64 versions of Tetris -- but like an elite, bloodthirsty software pirate, he started selling versions to companies around the world (including Mirrorsoft U.K. and Spectrum Holobyte in the United States) without first securing legal rights to the game by going through the proper channels. Specifically, he failed to consult with the Russian ministry for import and export of software and hardware. By November, Stein's activities had been discovered by the Russian programmers, who now had big, angry choices to make. Do they keep quiet? Will they need a lawyer?
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Tetris has been subject to many changes throughout releases since the 1980s. It is difficult to place a standard on the game, as newer releases frequently progress it either to make the game better or to keep players interested. Newer Tetris games have made the trend of pace rather than endurance. Older releases such as Game Boy or NES Tetris offer records according to points. Since the meter for points is set to only a certain number of digits, these game's records can be "maxed out" by an experienced player. The next big Game Boy release after Tetris, Tetris DX, in marathon mode — comparable to mode A in previous releases — allowed an additional digit for the point meter.
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