Tetris Effect 1989 Unlock

[Umbelina Baublitz]

InTetris, players complete lines by moving differently shaped pieces (tetrominoes), which descend onto the playing field. The completed lines disappear and grant the player points, and the player can proceed to fill the vacated spaces. The game ends when the uncleared lines reach the top of the playing field. The longer the player can delay this outcome, the higher their score will be. In multiplayer games, players must last longer than their opponents; in certain versions, players can inflict penalties on opponents by completing a significant number of lines. Some versions add variations such as 3D displays or systems for reserving pieces.

Since 1996, the Tetris Company has internally defined specifications and guidelines to which publishers must adhere to be granted a license to Tetris. The contents of these guidelines establish elements such as the correspondence of buttons and actions, the size of the field of play, and the system of rotation.[6][7]

The pieces on which the game of Tetris is based around are called "tetrominoes". Pajitnov's original version for the Electronika 60 computer used green brackets to represent the blocks that make up tetrominoes.[8] Versions of Tetris on the original Game Boy/Game Boy Color and on most dedicated handheld games use black-and-white or grayscale graphics, but most popular versions use a separate color for each distinct shape. Prior to the Tetris Company's standardization in the early 2000s, those colors varied widely from implementation to implementation.

The scoring formula for the majority of Tetris products is built on the idea that more difficult line clears should be awarded more points. For example, a single line clear in Tetris Zone is worth 100 points, clearing four lines at once (known as a Tetris) is worth 800, while each subsequent back-to-back Tetris is worth 1,200.[9] In conjunction, players can be awarded combos that exist in certain games which reward multiple line clears in quick succession. The exact conditions for triggering combos, and the amount of importance assigned to them, vary from game to game.[citation needed]

Nearly all Tetris games allow the player to press a button to increase the speed of the current piece's descent or cause the piece to drop and lock into place immediately, known as a "soft drop" and a "hard drop", respectively. While performing a soft drop, the player can also stop the piece's increased speed by releasing the button before the piece settles into place. Some games allow only one of either soft drop or hard drop; others have separate buttons for each. Many games award a number of points based on the height that the piece fell before locking, so using the hard drop generally awards more points.

In 1992, John Brzustowski at the University of British Columbia wrote a thesis reflecting on the question of whether or not one could theoretically play Tetris forever.[10] He reached the conclusion that the game is statistically doomed to end. If a player receives a sufficiently large sequence of alternating S and Z tetrominoes, the nave gravity used by the standard game eventually forces the player to leave holes on the board. The holes will necessarily stack to the top and, ultimately, end the game. If the pieces are distributed randomly, this sequence will eventually occur. Thus, if a game with, for example, an ideal, uniform, uncorrelated random number generator is played long enough, any player will almost surely top out.[11][12]

Modern versions of Tetris released after 2001 use a "bag-style" randomizer that guarantees players will never receive more than four S and Z pieces in a row by shuffling tetrominoes of all types for each seven pieces.[13]5:20 This is one of the "Indispensable Rules" enforced by the Tetris Guideline that all officially licensed Tetris games must follow.[7]

"Easy spin", or "infinite spin",[14] is a feature in some Tetris games where a tetromino stops falling for a moment after left or right movement or rotation, effectively allowing the player to suspend the piece while deciding where to place it. The mechanic was introduced in 1999's The Next Tetris[citation needed] and drew criticism in reviews of 2001's Tetris Worlds.[14]

This feature has been implemented into the Tetris Company's official guideline.[7] This type of play differs from traditional Tetris because it takes away the pressure of higher-level speed. Some reviewers[15] went so far as to say that this mechanism broke the game. The goal in Tetris Worlds is to complete a certain number of lines as fast as possible, so the ability to hold off a piece's placement will not make achieving that goal any faster. Later, GameSpot received "easy spin" more openly, saying that "the infinite spin issue honestly really affects only a few of the single-player gameplay modes in Tetris DS, because any competitive mode requires you to lay down pieces as quickly as humanly possible".[16]

Henk Rogers told Nintendo World Report that infinite spin was an intentional part of the game design, allowing novice players to expend some of their available scoring time to decide on the best placement of a piece. He observed that "gratuitous spinning" does not occur in competitive play, as expert players do not require much time to think about where a piece should be placed. A limitation has been placed on infinite lock delay in later games of the franchise, where after a certain amount of rotations and movements, the piece will instantly lock itself. This is defaulted to 15 such actions.[7]

Sega had planned to release a Genesis version of Tetris on April 15, 1989, but cancelled its release during Nintendo and Atari's legal battle;[33] fewer than ten copies were manufactured.[34] A new port of the arcade version by M2 was included in the Sega Genesis Mini microconsole, released in September 2019.[35]

In December 2005, Electronic Arts acquired Jamdat, a company specializing in mobile games.[40] Jamdat had previously bought a company founded by Rogers in 2001 which managed the Tetris license on mobile platforms. As a result, Electronic Arts held a 15-year license on all mobile phone releases of Tetris,[36] which expired on April 21, 2020.[41]

Tetris has been released on a multitude of platforms since the creation of the original version on the Electronika 60. The game is available on most game consoles and is playable on personal computers, smartphones and iPods. Guinness World Records recognized Tetris as the most ported video game in history, with over 200 variants having appeared on over 65 different platforms as of October 2010.[43] By 2017 this number had increased to 220 official variants.[44]

Since the 2000s, internet versions of the game have been developed. Commercial versions not approved by the Tetris Company tend to be purged due to company policy.[37][38] The most famous online version, Tetris Friends by Tetris Online, Inc., had attracted over a million registered users.[45] Tetris Online had also developed versions for console-based digital download services.[46][47] Because of its popularity and simplicity of development, Tetris is often used as a hello world project for programmers coding for a new system or programming language. This has resulted in the availability of a large number of ports for different platforms. For instance, μTorrent and GNU Emacs contain similar shape-stacking games as easter eggs.[48][49]

Within official franchise installments, each version has made improvements to accommodate advancing technology and the goal to provide a more complete game. Developers are given freedom to add new modes of play and revisit the concept from different angles. Some concepts developed on official versions have been integrated into the Tetris guidelines in order to standardize future versions and allow players to migrate between different versions with little effort.[7] The IBM PC version was the most evolved from the original version, featuring a graphical interface, colored tetrominoes, running statistics for the number of tetrominoes placed, and a guide for the controls.[8]

In computer science, it is common to analyze the computational complexity of problems, including real-life problems and games. It was proven that for the "offline" version of Tetris (the player knows the complete sequence of pieces that will be dropped, i.e. there is no hidden information) the following objectives are NP-complete:

The earliest versions of Tetris had no music.[13]3:10 The 1860s Russian folk tune "Korobeiniki" first appeared in Spectrum Holobyte's 1988 Macintosh and Apple IIGS versions of Tetris as one of the tunes that briefly plays at the start of each level.[51] It also appeared as the title screen music in Bullet-Proof Software's Japanese Famicom release. Nintendo's NES version does not include Korobeiniki; instead it includes an arrangement of "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" from the second act of The Nutcracker, composed by Tchaikovsky and arranged by Hirokazu Tanaka, along with two original compositions by Tanaka. Nintendo's Game Boy version includes "Korobeiniki" as well as Johann Sebastian Bach's French Suite No. 3 In B Minor (BWV 814), and an original track by Tanaka. The version included in the Super NES compilation Tetris & Dr. Mario uses arrangements of the Game Boy version's music.

"Korobeiniki" is used in most versions of the game, and has appeared in other games, albums and films that make reference to Tetris. Doctor Spin's 1992 Eurodance cover (under the name "Tetris") reached #6 on the UK singles chart. In the 2000s, the Tetris Company added as a prerequisite for the granting of the license that a version of "Korobeiniki" be available in the game.[22]

Tetris has been the subject of academic research. Vladimir Pokhilko was the first clinical psychologist to conduct experiments using Tetris.[52] Subsequently, it has been used for research in several fields including the theory of computation, algorithmic theory, and cognitive psychology.

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