Tetris, one of the most popular puzzle video games ever, is all set to get a movie based on it. The movie will share the same name as the game and will premiere worldwide in March at SXSW 2023 (South by Southwest), followed by a launch on Apple TV+ soon. It follows the story of a videogame salesman, Henk Rogers, who’s on a quest to acquire the rights to Tetris. As the game nears its 40th anniversary, we thought it’d be a good idea to get nostalgic, so here are six rare facts about it. Tetris’s creator did not make any money off the game initially Tetris was created by a man named Alexey Pajitnov who designed the game while working for the Academy of Science of the USSR. He didn’t really intend to make money off the game, only designing it for fun. Initial response from his own coworkers was very positive, who kept playing it – and soon the game spread across Moscow. Tetris grew to become one of the most financially successful video game series ever, only the Soviet Union took all of the money it made, leaving nothing for Pajitnov. The rights finally returned to their creator following the end of the Soviet Union in 1996, which he used to create the Tetris company. The Tetris Effect The addictiveness of Tetris earned the game its own psychological condition. Called Tetris Effect, the condition strikes when an action in a game is performed repeatedly over a period of time, leading you to see things associated with that action in real life. In Tetris, you may see shapes of blocks in real objects along with the possible ways in which they can be stored together, since that’s what the game is all about. Tetris defeated clone in copyright infringement case Videogame licensing/copyright is a complicated affair and Tetris had a turbulent history in that regard, with several companies licensing and sublicensing rights to the game that they didn't even hold in the first place. One of the more recent run-ins with copyright issues was in 2012 when a US court held that the development of an iOS clone of Tetris infringed copyright held by Tetris Holding. The iOS clone was developed by Xio Interactive and was called Mino. After the game was put up on the App Store, Tetris Holding sent take-down notices to Apple, which temporarily removed the game. After Tetris Holdings won the case, it led to a wider discussion around clones and to what extent they can be based on the ideas, concepts, and layout of their originals. Tetris Bio-Sensor accessory that could read heartbeats While videogame peripherals have tried to read hand and head movements in an attempt to create a more immersive experience where the player controls the on-screen character in a more direct manner, one Tetris iteration went the extra mile by trying to measure the player’s heartbeat. A version of Tetris released on the Nintendo 64 in Japan called Tetris 64 came bundled with a “Bio-Sensor” accessory that could be clipped onto the player’s ear. It read the player’s heartbeat information and relayed it to Tetris 64, which would then speed up or slow down based on the information. This little gadget only worked with Tetris though and never made it out of Japan. Tetris can change the shape of your brain A study published in 2009 in the journal BMC Research Notes observed that playing Tetris actually thickens the brain’s cortex, contributing to greater cognitive efficiency. The research tasked a group of 26 teenage girls with playing Tetris for 30 minutes everyday for 3 months. In just 3 months, MRIs showed thickening in three brain regions – one in the left frontal lobe and two in the left temporal lobe, which could translate to greater brain efficiency. There were no changes in the brains of girls who did not play the game. Tetris is the first videogame in space When Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Serebrov brought his Nintendo Game Boy with him aboard the Soyuz TM-17 rocket that was headed to the space station Mir, Tetris became the first videogame to be played in space. The Game Boy spent 196 days in space, orbiting the earth more than 3,000 times. The handheld console was eventually sold for $1,220 at an auction.
