NDM

Tetris is back - for the PS4 and Xbox One

During the summer of 1992, between my first and second years at university, I was working at a video game studio in Leamington Spa. We were supposed to be coding a game called Tank Commander for the PC, a long forgotten battle simulation – but one day someone brought in a Game Link cable, which allowed the connection of two Nintendo Game Boy consoles together. Of course, we immediately loaded up the Tetris competitive mode, in which any lines you cleared on your own screen would be cruelly transferred on to the bottom of your opponent's stack. Work ground to a halt and didn't really start up again for several days.

Most gamers have Tetris addiction stories. Since Russian programmer Alexey Pajitnov first developed the falling shape puzzler while working at the Moscow Academy of Sciences, it has sold hundreds of millions of copies on more than 50 different hardware platforms. Scientists and designers have pondered over its incredible appeal, the extraordinary compulsion people have to fit variously shaped tetriminos into a bucket. The beauty of Tetris is its simplicity – you need to understand no archaic conventions or rules of gaming. It is also essentially about something that we all find intrinsically satisfying: tidying up. Tetris is about imposing order, even if the task is Sisyphean, because the shapes don't stop falling until your stack reaches the top of the screen. And then it's all over.