
The Story of Tetris - cpncrunch
http://www.denofgeek.com/us/games/tetris/236288/the-incredibly-weird-story-behind-tetris
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dspillett
BBC4 did a good documentary on this a few years ago called "Tetris: From
Russia With Love". Recommended if you can find a copy on your preferred
streaming/download option.

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sengork
You may enjoy an interview with the tetris man himself:
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzsTvqyBRGv0-uyjDuQD1...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzsTvqyBRGv0-uyjDuQD1v1MUmRIf9TEk)

Some of the technological history he mentions is quite interesting.

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ganeshkrishnan
Henk Rogers now stays in Hawaii and runs an incubator BlueStartups.

I spoke to him at one of his launch parties in Honolulu and he is an amazingly
warm guy to speak to. It was a welcome change compared to the VCs here in
Australia who sit high on their iron throne and sneer down at startups

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bluedino
The licensing/legality of Tetris clones has always amused me.

Could someone have made a NES Tetris clone and called it 'Block Puzzle', or
would Nintendo have never approved it? Obviously the Atari version was called
Tetris so they got shutdown (plus Tengen was making unlicensed NES
cartridges...)

There aren't even many tetris clones on the iPhone. You've got the 'official'
version (thanks, EA) but lawyers have jumped on so many small-time developers.

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Kristine1975
If reading about Tetris made you want to play it (again), here's a BSD-
licensed implementation of a falling-blocks game that might be similar to
Tetris:
[https://github.com/zeromeaner/zeromeaner](https://github.com/zeromeaner/zeromeaner)

(Zeromeaner is a fork of NullpoMino since the latter hasn't been updated for
several years.)

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JoeDaDude
Not mentioned in the article is how the work of Solomon Golomb in his book
"Polyominoes" inspired the design of Tetris.
[https://www.fi.edu/laureates/solomon-w-
golomb](https://www.fi.edu/laureates/solomon-w-golomb)

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ensiferum
Funny story and a great game.

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xchaotic
Am I right that the original programmers didn't make a lot of money on that,
instead, various western corporations did? A bit like Kalashnikov guy.

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konart
Well, Kalashnikov's case is a bit different - there wasn't and couldn't be a
private company of the sort, he was working for the state.

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lucio
In the Soviet Union, everybody was working "for the state".

