Introduction
Welcome to TETRIS! This blog post is a guide on how to play tetris. If you do not know what tetris is, it’s a game where you need to stack different blocks and score points by clearing rows. It has been around for many years and has a lot of history and following behind it. I wanted to share my expertise with the world so everyone can be as much of an expert as I am!
Tetris is a Russian word. The literal translation of “tetra” is four, so it’s no surprise that in the game, the blocks you’re dropping are all four squares long. “Tetris” is actually a combination of the two words tetromino and tennis, which was Alexey Pajitnov’s favorite sport when he invented the game in 1984. Alexey had been a programmer for the Academy of Science in Moscow and decided to program his new puzzle game for one of the academy’s Electronika 60 computers.
Tetrominoes are the pieces that fall in Tetris. They’re named after tetromino, which is a word that describes 4 squares long. And since there are seven tetrominoes in total, “tetris” comes from combining those two words!
Alexey Pajitnov was born on March 11th, 1956 in Moscow, Russia and is known as the man who invented Tetris. He was working at Russia’s Academy of Science when he decided to make his new puzzle game for one of their Electronika 60 computers.
In Tetris, you try to arrange all your falling blocks (called tetrominoes) into horizontal rows without leaving any gaps. Once you’ve filled a row completely, it disappears. If you don’t fill up the rows fast enough and they reach the top of the playing field, the game is over.
Tetris is a tile-matching puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Russian game designer Alexey Pajitnov. It was released on June 6, 1984, while he was working for the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow. He derived its name from the Greek numerical prefix tetra- (alluding to four) and tennis, Pajitnov’s favorite hobby. Within several years of its release, Tetris became one of the most popular video games in history.
The original NES version of Tetris had just an A and B button. The A button moved your blocks left and right; B button made them fall faster; and holding down both buttons at once would make them rotate clockwise.
The original NES version of Tetris had just an A and B button. The A button moved your blocks left and right; B button made them fall faster; and holding down both buttons at once would make them rotate clockwise. In the arcade version, you could change the rotation speed by pressing Select instead of Start.
As for controls on modern consoles like PlayStation 4 or Xbox One? Well… let’s just say it’s easier to play all those fancy new games that have come out since Tetris debuted than attempt to use all those extra buttons!
Nintendo even included a caution on how to avoid causing damage to your television screen: “Please do not press the control pad with excessive force.”
You can see how Nintendo was worried about players pressing the control pad too hard. The NES version of Tetris had only two buttons: one for moving your blocks left, and another for moving them right. Plus, if you held both buttons down at the same time, your pieces would rotate clockwise.
So what do these three things have in common? They were all actions that could cause damage to your television screen!
Conclusion
Take a step back and think about what you’ve learned here.
You’ve seen that your code can be written more concisely and more readably, two goals which will help you as you continue your journey in programming.
However, before I leave you to try creating some Tetris games of your own, I’ll lay out some problems for you to solve:
- Can you get the game to work like “Endless Mode”? Hint: use an infinite loop.
- Can you create a new shape? You can either add it randomly with all of the other shapes or make a completely different mode where it’s just this one shape and maybe modify the size of it?
- Can you create a high score counter? Make sure that when they lose, they have an option to restart the game so that their high score can be updated if necessary.
