TL19TETRIS
Latest
'Tetris' turns 35 this week. It's still the best puzzle game of all time.
At Engadget, we spend every day looking at how technology will shape the future. But it's also important to look back at how far we've come. That's what This Week in Tech History does. Join us every weekend for a recap of historical tech news, anniversaries and advances from the recent and not-so-recent past. This week, we're wishing Tetris a happy 35th birthday!
'Tetris 99' hands-on: The battle royale game for everyone else
Last night, Nintendo dropped an awful lot of things to get excited about if you're a Switch owner. Alongside a Zelda remake, a new game from the makers of Bayonetta, and Super Mario Maker 2, it resurrected Tetris (bigger than Mario, right?) for 2019. The company (and the Tetris experts at Arika) have made it battle royale-style.
‘Tetris Effect’ is therapy for distracted, anxious minds
Can a video game be more than just a game? Can it train you to focus? To disassociate yourself from traumatic memories and heal your mind? Can it transcend your personal experience and bridge a geopolitical divide? These aren't just ridiculous claims from a marketer's fever dream -- one video game has done all of this before, reaching hundreds of millions of players: Tetris. And it's back again, just when the world needs it most.
Watch this streamer accidentally break a 'Tetris' world record
As the old saying goes, if at first you don't succeed, try again. Or, if you're Jonas Neubauer (AKA NubbinsGoody), break a different world record instead. The NES Tetris maestro was trying to break the world record for speed-clearing 100 lines in the classic 80s game and was doing alright until he made a minor error (a basically negligible whoopsie for most players, at that) and lost his focus. "That was a fast 300,000" he says casually, before checking his Twitch comments and then realising that yeah, it was a fast 300,000. Fast enough to earn him the world record for hitting the score in under two minutes, in fact. And understandably, he's pretty excited. And the 100 lines record? He broke it the next day.
You too can build a 33-foot-wide computer to play 'Tetris'
When we marvel at advances in computing, we compare the mechanical calculators that filled rooms with the smartphones in our pockets. While our palm-sized miracles are magnitudes more powerful than the processors that put men on the moon, their internals are so complex that they're extremely difficult to conceptualize. One man wanted to see for himself how a modern computer works, so he started building one in 2012 that expanded its digital guts across the room, laying out its systems for the layman to understand. Last week, he finally finished his macro machine: Behold, the Megaprocessor.
'Tetris' the movie is going to be a sci-fi trilogy
Empire has interviewed the man tasked with bringing a decades-old falling block game to the big screen -- and he says it's going to be a three-parter. Larry Kasanoff says that "because the story we conceived is so big. This isn't us splitting the last one of our eight movies in two to wring blood out of the stone. It's just a big story." Big story. Huge.
