| TETRIS (GAME BOY) |
For the 8-bit NES Version I still have a physical copy of - click here. The impact of Tetris cannot be understated. In 1985, Alexi Pajitnov created the game while working in Russia as an after-hours project. The game eventually was seen and found by people all over the world, leading to a long story aboutr licencing, litigation, and capitalism meets the Iron Curtain. By 1989, Nintendo had the console rights to Tetris and released the game on every platform they had at the time, that would be the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), and the then brand new Nintendo Game Boy - which we are talking about here.
Tetris is a pretty simple to learn, hard to master puzzle game where various pieces consisting of 4 blocks fall down from above, you have to aline them into "rows" to clear the rows, and if you clear 4 rows at a time you get a "tetris" and thusly bonus points. The NES version is in full color, and has different visuals from the Game Boy Version. This was the killer app that helped launch the Game Boy, in part because Tetris was not attractive to just kids, but to adults as well, including my middle aged dmom who put post-its of hehr high scores on the Nintendo cartridge and confused the St. Basil's Cathedral with the Taj Mahal! LOL. It was not unusual to find these in business people's pockets, hell, even Dave Grohl played Game Boy during mixing of In Utero, so it goes to show this was not a singular popular game. Tetris has gone on to be one of those games like Solitaire or Pac-Man that has found itself ported to darn near everything. I would not even be surprised if there's someone out there plying Tetris on their IoT enabled Toaster. Shoot, a nerd kid I went to school with had this on his mom's Brother word processor!What CAn I Say - My Experiences Tetris came with the Game Boy I bought for my birthday with $75 in 1992. It quickly became my primary companion Pre-Guitar. |
