#33: Tetris (Nintendo, Game Boy, 1989)

Paul McCartney, so the story goes, woke up with the tune to “Yesterday” in his head, fully formed, and had to be told that it wasn’t anyone else’s song that he’d heard somewhere before, and was in fact, a wholly original creation. It’s as if, in writing the song, McCartney wasn’t performing an act of creation so much as giving form to something that already existed, something that necessarily must exist. One wonders if Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov ever felt something akin to this during the creation process of the game.

It may, perhaps, do a disservice to the the real work and creativity that Pajitnov put into the game to suggest that it was instead the result of some divine inspiration, but the fact is that it is difficult to conceive of the idea that Tetris was created by a mere mortal. It is the very definition of genius in simplicity, a game so simple that anyone could have come up with it, but, of course, anyone didn’t. Alexey Pajitnov did. And for all its apparent simplicity, there are many choices in the design that could so easily have gone another way that might have prevented the game from taking the world by storm in quite the same way. The width and height of the well into which the shapes fall, for instance; or the speed at which they fall, and the rate that this increases as you progress. The fact that you can speed this up yourself on a case-by-case basis. The ability to rotate your tetrominoes, which reduces nineteen distinct shapes to just seven. How many other similarly simple games exist that never quite caught on due to making a wrong decision on their equivalent to any one of these factors? It is impossible to know.