Trivia
It was named #4 out of 200 of the "Greatest Games of Their Time" by EGM Issue #200 (Feb. 2006).
Tetris was named #14 overall among the “150 Best Games of All Time” by Computer Gaming World Magazine (15th Anniversary Issue--November 1996).
Contributed by
PCGamer77 
(3025) on May 01, 2008.
In 2008 Tetris is listed in the Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition as the most ported game, appearing on 55 different computer game platforms.
Contributed by
Sciere (119609) on Apr 30, 2008.
Tetris turns up, of all places, in Thomas Pynchon's 2006 novel "Against the Day", around page 100:
The ship in the distance was distinguished by an envelope with the onionlike shape---and nearly the dimensions, too---of a dome on an Eastern Orthodox church, against whose brilliant red surface was represented, in black, the Romanoff crest, and above it, in Gold Cyrillic lettering, the legend BOL'SHAIA IGRA, or, "The Great Game." It was readily recognized by all as the flagship of Randolph's mysterious Russian counterpart---and, far too often, nemesis---Captain Igor Padzhitnoff [...]
The parallel organization at St. Petersburg, known as the Tovarishchi Slutchainyi, was notorious for promoting wherever in the world they chose a program of mischief, much of its motivation opaque to the boys, Padzhitnoff's own specialty being to arrange for bricks and masonry, always in the four-block fragments which had become his "signature," to fall on and damage targets designated by his superiors. This lethal debris was generally harvested from the load-bearing walls of previous targets of opportunity.
Alexey Pajitnov, creator of Tetris, was the first staff game designer at Microsoft
After playing the Game Boy version of Tetris for a while, Liam Jordan submitted Zen and the Art of Tetris to Gamespot, an article about why "life is like a game of Tetris."
The BBC just aired an interesting documentary on the potted history of the game entitled "Tetris: From Russia With Love".
In the late 80s, when Tetris was under the control of the Soviet Union's electronic gaming department, the man responsible, Mr Belikov, managed to masterfully play the West at its own capitalist game in what stands as an interesting footnote to The Cold War.
Belikov cut tycoon Robert Maxwell out of the equation (who made threats about damaging trade with the UK all the way to his contacts in The Kremlin), meaning that rights that had already been sold on to Atari via a Hungarian entrepreneur called Robert Stein were null and void. Henk Rogers, a likeable lone producer who had picked up games for the Japanese market, bravely went to Moscow and managed to secure both the rights to handheld and home console Tetris for Nintendo from under everyone's nose. Belikov held meetings with Stein, Rogers and Maxwell Jr on the same day, playing one off against the other!
Alexey Pajitnov, who wrote the original game whilst working at the state's computer centre in Moscow, only started to make money from Tetris royalties in the past few years. He emigrated to the US and now works for Microsoft.
The word "Tetris" comes from the ancient Greek "tetra", which means "four".
Tetris was voted #3 in the Top 100 Games of All Time poll published by Game Informer Magazine (Issue 100, August 2001).
Contributed by
PCGamer77 (3025) on Jul 28, 2001.
This game is a member of Computer Gaming World's Hall of Fame.
Included in the original DOS commercial release package was a memory-resident version of Tetris, with graphical backgrounds and all. It took up over 50K of precious DOS RAM, but you could play Tetris instantly from within any application.
