blue-planet-software
Latest
Tetris Ultimate drops to Vita this fall
The next entry in the saga of longstanding falling block puzzler Tetris will continue its tradition of appearing on handheld platforms, as Tetris Ultimate will launch on Vita this fall. Announced last week, Tetris Ultimate includes four-player multiplayer and six different modes. The game will hit Vita alongside PC after it reaches Xbox One and PS4 this summer. The game celebrates a major anniversary: Tetris just celebrated 30 years of love, life and the liberation of blocky lines. [Image: Ubisoft]
Tetris hits 100 million paid mobile downloads
That's right, Tetris, the grandfather of puzzle games, the one that absolutely everyone and their mother likes, the Slim Jim of video games, has been purchased on mobile phones a staggering 100 million times since 2005. As you may have guessed, that makes Tetris the best-selling mobile game of all time. The announcement comes by way of EA, which has had the mobile rights to the game since 2006. Granted, given how often people upgrade their phones, we're sure plenty have downloaded the game more than once. And why wouldn't they? It's Tetris. Said Henk Rogers, CEO of Blue Planet Software, which manages Tetris licensing rights, "Tetris on mobile will never go away." Frankly, we hope he's right. If mobile Tetris did go away, we might actually have to converse with people while standing in line at the DMV. [Tetris block font by David Martin]
Tetris Company's Rogers clears lines, the air
Henk Rogers is a rich man these days, after having secured the license for a certain Russian computer game back in the '80s. It was Rogers who licensed Tetris out to Nintendo for use in the Game Boy and NES, and it's Rogers who started The Tetris Company to manage future Tetris licensing. That money is now going into the Blue Planet Foundation, a nonprofit Rogers has set up to research global warming. The foundation hosted a summit in Rogers' hometown of Honolulu in order to gather experts, in the interest of reducing fossil fuel dependency.It's just one of Rogers' four "missions," which are about as ambitious as anything can be -- so much so that he doesn't expect them to be fulfilled within his lifetime: eliminating the need for fossil fuel, ending war, and, uh, understanding the universe. The other goal? "We need to make a back-up of life on Earth. We need to take each species on Earth and make a backup and populate other planets." Sounds vaguely crazy, but sensible at the same time!
