Tetris is an iconic game with a fascinating history. Dive in today to learn all about this classic puzzle game.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is the history of Tetris?
All right. So you mentioned a guy that's very key to this. In fact, he's the most key because he is the creator, Alexei Pajitnov. The year is 1984. Very big key year in American history in a lot of ways. And he was working at a place called the Gerard Knitzen Computer Center, Centra. which is a part of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
And he came up with this game that he originally called genetic engineering. Great name. Eventually would land on Tetris, but it was a copy initially of his favorite puzzle game when he was a kid called Pentomino.
I'm glad. Yes, you said it. It took me a little while and I was like, oh, like Domino, but with five.
Yeah, exactly. And it was like any other puzzle. It was a wooden box and you had these pieces, 12 wooden tiles, each represented a different shape that can be made with five squares. And it was just a physical thing. It was in a rectangular horizontal box.
And you would just, you know, it was one of those puzzles where you would put the things in there and it wouldn't make like an Elton John album cover. It would just fit and you would be like, hey, I won. I fit all the pieces in here.
Right. So, yeah, he basically took that and adapted it into, he's like, well, I'm going to totally revolutionize this. I'm going to change the shapes from five boxes to four. And so you can't call it Pentomino anymore because Penta is what, five in Greek or Latin, something like that. Right.
Yeah. Five squares.
Yeah. So he called it Tetris, named after Tetra. Yeah. The Greek prefix meaning four. And apparently he also liked tennis and wanted to give tennis a little shout out. So that's what the is is from. Tetra, tennis, Tetris.
Yeah.
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Chapter 2: How did Tetris become a global phenomenon?
I know. This is in the 1930s. And she noticed that at restaurants, when a server had a large table of like, let's say, 12 people, they could remember their orders, which was remarkable. But then when it came time to deliver food to the table, they had forgotten them.
So the idea here is that the, you know, with the Zeigarnik effect is that the brain really, really wants to store information about a task that isn't complete yet. Right. like taking an order for 12, or in the case of Tetris, they're exploiting it by like constantly creating a little unfinished mission to create a line of blocks that you get fulfilled and then they drop another one.
So it's just triggering this constant feeling of satisfaction because you're completing these tasks by completing these lines over and over and over.
And then after you complete one, you have another task to do. So your brain is activated again, like you said, moment by moment, over and over and over again. Pretty cool. It is super cool. There is another guy named Richard Heyer, or I'm sure in your pronunciation, Heyer, who in 1991, back in, yeah, in 91 at UC Irvine, he actually scanned the brains of Tetris players and
And he found that the brain is much more engaged when you're new to Tetris, which is probably a reason why it became such a popular game. It just sucks in new players and that you start using way more energy in your brain when you start playing Tetris. And then it kind of goes down over time as you get better.
And that apparently is when most people stop playing Tetris after a while when they get really good at it because the brain's no longer being challenged like it was originally thanks to the Zeigarnik effect.
Yeah, yeah. There have been other studies, of course. There was one that found that Tetris may reduce the strength of cravings. This was in 2015 by the British and Australian psychologist. Oh. The British and Australian. Is that a band?
I thought that was the name of the band.
It's like a British sea power, one of my favorite bands. Right. Yeah, so just by psychologists in Britain and Australia, I think. Got it. Basically where they used iPods to check in with undergraduates seven times a day to see if they were craving drugs, food, sex, and other things. They just said yes. Yeah, that you might crave. Yeah, they're like, we're undergrads, duh.
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Chapter 5: What are the psychological effects of playing Tetris?
Z, there is a Z, is the mirror, the red mirror of the Z. And that is, you can call it a lightning bolt or the left dog or the left snake or the Cleveland Z. Also, what I said before.
Yeah. It's just more disappointing than the road. There's the T, the T piece that actually is used in the Tetris logo. And the T is called the Tiwi.
The Tiwi. OK. And then that that I called it the I-beam. But that's the cyan four line clear. That's also the one that if you if you put it in the wrong place, you can really screw you. But that that can produce that full Tetris. You call it the stick, the line, the slim Jim, the long, skinny one.
The hero is the official name for it, though.
Oh, okay. That makes sense.
That's where that song, that Enrique Iglesias song comes from. It's about Tetris. Little known fact.
So did you mention the championship?
No. Yes, I did. The classic Tetris World Championship. That's the big one. And they still use the original NES version, the one that I played and Yumi played and everybody but you played, apparently.
That's right, which is a key distinction when it comes to competing, I guess, because I would have been I would have been pretty lost, although there's no way I could. I wasn't like competition level. I was just OK at it.
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Chapter 7: What is the Tetris effect and why is it important?
Oh, you're probably right.
That's my take on it.
No, I think you're totally right.
Okay. Well, we should say Christopher Martinez, a.k.a. Cheese, a.k.a. Cheesy, and we'll get it in there somewhere.
So he introduced a technique called rolling. It's also called fly hecking, H-E-C-C-I-N-G, after a guy named Hector Fly Rodriguez, who developed this technique on arcade game consoles, not even for Tetris, just on arcade game console, like, you know, how to press the buttons faster. And I'm going to do a little audio, Josh, if you'll allow. Yeah, please. Because did you see how this was done?
Did you see Hector's fingers? I did. It's amazing. This guy has like, they look like breakdancing fingers. They're just so fluid. But if you imagine like a stand-up arcade game and those big round buttons, if you want to press that really fast, you can go tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap with one finger. Or you can do this with your four fingers.
Very nice.
Did that come through, you think?
Good Foley work.
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