Saturday marked the 25th birthday of one of our all-time-favorite video games…Tetris! Yep, that crazy-addictive block-stacking insanity has been making our fingers hurt for twenty five years now. Crazy, huh?
I remember first seeing Tetris on my stepmom Wendy’s Gameboy in the late-80’s and thinking: “Wow, what is one boring-ass game…this thing will never catch on!” Hmmm…I guess that shows what I know about gaming.
And even though Christine and our friend James went crazy for Tetris when we first moved to L.A. in the early-90’s, I must admit that my fondness for the game peaked much more recently. Looking to fill up our then-new iPod, Elvis with some cool games and stuff when we first bought it, I downloaded two games: The Sims Bowling, which totally sucks, and, you guessed it…Tetris.
And guess which game I play almost nightly before going to bed? T-E-T-R-I-S! It’s crazy, I know, but there is something so freaking comforting about strategically stacking those stupid blocks over and over again every night. And I can’t even begin to tell you how many times that game has saved my life on punishing airport layovers or insanely-long days on movie sets. Yikes…
So, happy 25th birthday Tetris and many thanks to the mad Russian techie, Alexey Pojitnov, who made all of this possible way back in 1984. History may find more deserving Russians to celebrate, but you’re the king of Kremlin Kool our house, dude!
make. see. eat. do. 
You know what’s crazier? I don’t even KNOW how to play Tetris!
The only game I ever got addicted to was the Terminator game at the arcade. You had a gun to shoot down Terminators and every time you killed one, the gun would vibrate in your hand. I felt totally badass. Good thing they don’t have a portable, iPod version of that or else I’d waste more time every day than I already do.
Just found out there’s going to be a giant motion-based Tetris game at Burning Man this year. Could be really cool:
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2009/06/tetris-creator-skeptical-of-project-natal/
Me thinks either the Romero’s are super, super, exhaustingly busy OR Facebook has overtaken blogging. I’m missing my weekly procrastination material.
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