The First Version Ran on a Computer That Could Not Draw

The Elektronika 60 had no graphics mode, so the original pieces were built out of punctuation marks.

The machine Pajitnov wrote the first version on was an Elektronika 60, a Soviet minicomputer broadly comparable to a DEC PDP-11. It had a text terminal and no graphics capability whatsoever.

Blocks made of brackets

With no way to draw a filled square, the pieces were assembled from text characters — square brackets, in the best-known account, pairs of them forming each cell so the blocks came out roughly square rather than tall and thin. The well was a region of the terminal; the pieces fell by redrawing characters.

It is worth pausing on how severe that constraint is. There is no colour to distinguish one piece from another. There is no smooth motion — a piece does not slide down, it is erased from one row and printed on the next. There is no sound. What remains is the pure mechanism: shapes arrive, you rotate and place them, complete rows disappear.

That the game was already compelling in that form tells you where its appeal actually lives. Every version since has added colour, animation, music and effects, and none of them changed the thing that makes you play one more round.

Why the port mattered so much

The Elektronika 60 was not a machine anybody had at home. For the game to spread it needed to run on something that could be copied and carried, which is what Vadim Gerasimov's IBM PC port provided — colour, and a floppy disk.

From there it moved the way software moved in the 1980s: hand to hand, without anybody's permission, first around Moscow's institutes and then outward. No marketing, no distribution deal, no company. By the time anyone with commercial instincts encountered it, it had already travelled a long way on its own.

A constraint worth remembering

Modern versions of this genre — including this one — pile on particle effects, synthesised soundtracks and screen shake. All of it is enjoyable and none of it is load-bearing. The original ran in a terminal, in monochrome, made of punctuation, and people could not stop playing it.

Read next

• Who Invented Tetris?Alexey Pajitnov wrote the original in 1984 at a Soviet research institute, on a computer that could not draw graphics.
• Where the Name "Tetris" Comes FromA Greek numeral prefix welded to the name of a racquet sport, because the author liked both.
• How the Game Escaped the Soviet UnionIt spread by informal copying, reached Hungary, and was picked up by a Western agent before anyone had signed anything.
• ELORG and the Most Confusing Licence in GamesA Soviet state agency, a chain of Western sublicences, and a fight over what the word "computer" means.
• Where Pieces Spawn and Why the Buffer ExistsA couple of hidden rows above the visible field give rotations somewhere to go.
• When to Take a SingleA single is the worst clear in the game and sometimes the correct one. Knowing which is a real skill.