Tetris

This looped animation demonstrates the gameplay of Tetris.

Tetris is a video game originally designed and programmed by Soviet national Alexey Pajitnov in 1986. The game soared to global fame three years later when it was released with Nintendo's popular handheld video game player, the Game Boy. Tetris is now available for nearly every video game console and computer operating system and for a number of other electronics, including graphing calculators, mobile phones, portable media players, and PDAs. It has even been played on the sides of buildings, with the record holder for the world's largest fully functional game of Tetris being a 1995 effort by Dutch students that lit up all fifteen floors of the electrical engineering department at Delft University of Technology.

The objective of Tetris is to arrange puzzle pieces—called tetrominoes—as they fall into a silo so that they will not leave any trapped empty space. When a solid row is filled from one side of the silo to the other, the row disappears and the whole pile drops down one notch. If the pieces are not fit together, the pile continues to climb toward the ceiling, and upon reaching it, the game is over.

The background music included with the original Tetris game was derived from a Russian song composed around a nineteenth century Russian poem called "Korobeiniki". The adaptation of the song used in the original Tetris video game was further simplified by Japanese musicians in the 1960's. In Western culture, the theme music for Tetris has become quite well-known but is identified almost exclusively as the Theme from Tetris.

Due to the popularity of Tetris, it has often been remade and sold on newer consoles alongside unique game modes, such as multiplayer battle modes, campaign modes, and challenges such as clearing a large quantity of lines as quickly as possible. Recent popular Tetris games include Tetris 99, a 99 player Tetris battle royale and Tetris Effect, a Tetris remake with enhanced graphics and additional game modes.

In January 2024, Willis Gibson, a 13-year-old Tetris prodigy became the first person to 'beat' the original Tetris by reaching the highest score possible, 999999 points . When one reaches 999999 points, the game crashes. This was only known previously through utilizing artificial intelligence to play Tetris. Gibson made Tetris history by being the first human to reach the end, and has been congratulated by the CEO of the Tetris company.

The Tetris Effect

The Tetris effect is a term coined to describe how an activity or object focused on for an extended period of time can be visualized in one's mind. This term references the phenomenon that gamers encountered when playing Tetris for an extended amount of time: players reported dreaming about Tetris blocks and visualizing the game while they were awake. Though this term can be applied to any dreams or visualizations about a repeated activity, the phenomenon continues to carry the Tetris name.