Pod Insights Stuff You Should Know The Wild History of Tetris About this episode Tetris is an iconic game with a fascinating history. Dive in today to learn all about this classic puzzle game.
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Transcript 10,150 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:03 Speaker 03 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.
1:13 Josh Clark? Dasvidanya, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know, comrade.
1:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, the Tetris edition. How much Tetris have you played? What's your background there?
1:31 Josh Clark? I was a very casual Tetris player. I mean, I didn't even realize there were as many levels as there are. I tend to flip out when things start to really go fast, so I wasn't very good at Tetris, but I did enjoy it when I played it.
1:47 Speaker 02 And where'd you play it? Like, what system?
1:49 Josh Clark? On the NES, the classic NES.
1:51 Speaker 02 Okay.
1:53 Josh Clark? How about you, Chuck? What is your relationship to Tetris?
1:56 Speaker 02 Well, the only way I ever played it was on a Game Boy. I don't know if I had a Game Boy, if it was Scott's. I know he had one, but at any rate, I played it on the Game Boy only and really, really loved it and got into that for a while. I wasn't obsessed with it or anything, but I did have the Tetris dreams. I did walk around seeing things as Tetris on the landscape. So it definitely invaded my consciousness for a while, but I never played it on anything but the Game Boy, so I don't know how to play it with a regular controller or whatever.
2:30 Josh Clark? Yeah, I couldn't, like, I tried playing it on computer and I was like, I don't, I can't get this. I'm just used to the NES controller for it.
2:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, I was gonna try and play it today, just like whatever. I'm sure there's some free online version you can play on your desktop, but I was afraid. I was a little behind today. I was like, I'm not gonna do it, because I'll be 30 minutes later.
2:52 Josh Clark? Right.
2:52 Speaker 02 I will have still be playing Tetris, because it's a very addictive game, and part of why it was successful is because it seems like everybody that ever tried Tetris, early on at least, loved and became pretty addicted to Tetris.
3:10 Josh Clark? Yeah, I was asking Yumi, I was like, did you ever play Tetris? And she just kinda gave me this. She didn't even look over at me. She just looked at me out of the corner of her eyes and was like, I was pretty good at Tetris.
3:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, I could see that.
3:23 Josh Clark? Yeah, I never, I didn't ask her if she had the dreams, but I could see her having the dreams. Apparently, that's a really common phenomenon, right? I think it's actually called the Tetris effect.
3:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. When it starts invading your dreams, or you start, you know, if you're walking around a city and you start looking at an alleyway that you could drop a long eye beam into, then it's in your bones.
3:43 Josh Clark? Yeah, for sure. So yeah, we'll talk a little bit about why it's so addictive. People have come up with theories for it. Like, it's a video game that's so addictive, psychologists have actually come up with theories to explain why Tetris in particular, not video games, Tetris in particular, has that Tetris effect and is so addictive. Which should kind of give you an idea of why, I think we talked about this in our Minecraft episode, that where I got everything right, that Tetris is actually the best-selling game of all time.
4:16 Speaker 02 Yeah.
4:16 Josh Clark? Closing in on 550 million copies.
4:20 Speaker 02 Wow.
4:21 Josh Clark? Yeah.
4:22 Speaker 02 That is a staggering number of people, man.
4:24 Josh Clark? Right. And this is, this video game hasn't been around since like, the 1800s, like, it's from 1984.
4:31 Speaker 02 It's not Oregon Trail.
4:32 Josh Clark? Right, right, exactly. You can't catch dysentery playing it.
4:36 Speaker 02 No, and big thanks to Olivia for this one. I had this idea when I recently remembered that I had not watched the Tetris Cold War thriller movie. That is a very loose sort of story about how this game was developed because it's a very interesting story set against the backdrop of the Cold War. They really, it's a fictionalized version, so it sort of loosely follows some of it, but it looked like a really fun movie that I'd kind of forgot about. So I asked Olivia to put this together and I'm gonna watch the movie sometime this week, I think.
5:12 Josh Clark? So is that huge chase scene where Alexei Pagetnov is chasing the CIA agents across rooftops in Istanbul and catches up with them and kills them with a garrote is made up?
5:23 Speaker 02 I think it is. And he was throwing Tetris pieces at them and building Tetris walls. That's what the movie they should have done.
5:31 Josh Clark? Yeah, for sure. That would have been pretty cool. He just like holds his hand out and instead of a web coming out, it's Tetris pieces right in your face.
5:38 Speaker 02 All right, so you mentioned a guy that's very key to this. In fact, he's the most key because he is the creator, Alexei Pagetnov. The year is 1984, very big key year in American history in a lot of ways. And he was working at a place called the Gerard Nitsen Computer Centra, which is a part of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. And he came up with this game that he originally called Genetic Engineering. Great name. Eventually would land on Tetris, but it was a copy initially of his favorite puzzle game when he was a kid called Pentamino.
6:21 Josh Clark? I'm glad, yes, you said it. It took me a little while and I was like, oh, like domino, but with five.
6:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. And it was like any other puzzle. It was a wooden box and you had these pieces, 12 wooden tiles, each represented a different shape that can be made with five squares. And it was just a physical thing. It was in a rectangular horizontal box and you would just, you know, it was one of those puzzles where you would put the things in there and it wouldn't make like an Elton John album cover. It would just fit. And you would be like, hey, I won. I fit all the pieces in here.
6:55 Josh Clark? Right. So, um, yeah, he basically took that and adapted it into, he's like, well, I'm going to totally revolutionize this. I'm going to change the shapes from five, five boxes to four. And, and so you can't call it pentamino anymore because pent is what, five in Greek or Latin, something like that? Right?
7:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, five squares.
7:18 Josh Clark? Yeah. Um, so he called it Tetris, named after Tetra. Yeah. The Greek prefix meaning four. And apparently he also liked tennis and wanted to give tennis a little shout out. So that's what the is is from. Tetra tennis, Tetris.
7:35 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yeah. And this initial version, like I said, it was called genetic engineering. And at first it was just a horizontal, but he just basically did the exact same thing digitally that he had in his physical, I guess, sitting in his closet somewhere with pentamino. It was a horizontal square with these pieces that you would, you know, click, I don't know if you dragged at that point or not. Did they even have the mouse at that point?
8:00 Josh Clark? I don't know.
8:03 Speaker 02 Anyway, you could get it over into that box and fit it. The pieces didn't fly down and they didn't disappear when you would complete a line like the classic Tetris. That would come later when he would make it a big, and that was sort of the key basically was he found that that first version of genetic engineering was boring. And if he made it vertical, he made the pieces fall. And if he made those lines disappear as you went, that created this addictive quality that made Tetris Tetris.
8:31 Josh Clark? That's it. Did you say that there weren't any graphics, that they were like characters and punctuation marks instead of graphics?
8:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, that was the first version.
8:39 Josh Clark? The whole thing was made up of brackets, like each line was brackets and like the pieces were like exclamation points or periods or greater than symbols. It was a pretty primitive, rough first version, but yeah, it had, had kind of the bones to it, but it wasn't until you start clearing lines that that's what Tetris is all about. So around the same time, he had a colleague called Dmitry Pavlovsky, was also working on games, and there was a 16-year-old involved, young lad named Vadim Garashimov, who was a summer intern and just happened to be at the right place at the right time. And the three of them got together with another guy, a psychologist named Vladimir Pokilko.
9:21 Josh Clark? And you put the four of them together and you have the earliest developers of Tetris.
9:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, he was interested in doing puzzles in relation to his psychological experiments. Garashimov and the other guy, Pavlovsky, were porting games over to IBMPCs, which a lot of people in the Soviet Union, or not a lot of people, but that was sort of one of the main computers that they could have access to at the time. And they had this idea like, hey, we might be able to like profit from this one day, but that's going to be a tricky thing because, you know, this is Soviet Union and everything that we do belongs to state.
9:59 Josh Clark? Yeah, that was a great Yakov Smirnoff, by the way.
10:02 Speaker 02 I appreciate that.
10:03 Josh Clark? Yeah, so as we'll see, the, the developers, Pajinoff, apparently was like, hey, you know, I think it'd be a great idea if the USSR owned the rights to this game that we developed for the first 10 years. What do you think? He had said that it was basically an impossible choice. Like if he didn't do that, they would cheat him out of it and he would probably be investigated by the KGB anyway. So he just went along with that. But before that ever happened, there was, the game started to spread. We mentioned Pokilko. He was a psychologist and he took it to a copy to the Moscow Medical Institute where he worked and was like, hey, why don't you guys try playing this, see what you think?
10:47 Josh Clark? And apparently the workers played so often that they had to delete it from their computers because they, they just couldn't be trusted with Tetris on their computers to get their work done.
10:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, that became kind of a common refrain in this story as it goes along as more and more people are like, "Why are all my employees crowded around the computer monitor?" And they would go in and find them playing Tetris. It spread to, like I said, IBM PC users in the Soviet Union, was copied onto floppy disks, transported across borders, and eventually got him Robert Stein, who owned a UK-based company called Andromeda Software, LTD. He saw this in Hungary. He was like, "Hey, Hungary gave us the Rubik's Cube. Here's another puzzle game. This is pretty interesting to me." So in 1986, he realized that he had
11:39 Speaker 02 a, or I guess he got a hold of a telex number for, that could reach Pagetnov, and he sent him a telex. And they started telexing back and forth, saying like, "Hey, I'm interested in this." He ultimately got a reply that said, "Yes, we are interested. We would like to have this deal." And Stein didn't realize, in broken Russian, that just meant, "Yeah, let's keep talking." He thought that meant, "Hey, sounds like we have a deal."
12:06 Josh Clark? Right. So he actually started creating copies of it, right? And getting ready to sell it in the West, is that correct?
12:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, here's where it gets a little confusing, because this whole story about who has the rights gets really in the weeds. And what happened was Stein started, he thought they had a deal, so he started developing the launch of this thing, because he thought he had a deal, when he did not even have these rights. Like, they literally made a deal with a guy named Robert Maxwell, a British newspaper mogul. There's a lot more to this guy than, you know, we could probably do a whole episode on him. But he had a couple of companies, one called Spectrum Holobite in the United States, and one called Mirrorsoft in the UK, and he made licensing deals.
12:55 Speaker 02 For PC and console rights with Mirasoft, the UK and Europe for 3,000 pounds plus royalties. And then for Spectrum Holobite for North America and Japan for 11,000 plus royalties. When he didn't even own the rights to do so at this point.
13:11 Josh Clark? Yeah, so apparently they were out there selling units and then the Russians got word of this. Something called LORG, Electronorg Technica, which was the Soviet organization for developing things like games like Tetris. And then owning the rights to it. Got in touch with Stein and we're like, hey, you can't do this anymore. Like we own that. This is even Cold War stuff says that this is wrong.
13:36 Speaker 02 Right.
13:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, so in January 29th, 88, Spectrum Holobite released it in the US. And he didn't get his deal signed with LORG because they weren't like, hey, shut this down. You can't do it. They said, hey, let's talk. He didn't get his actual deal signed with them until the end of February. So he was selling these things for a month in the United States before he even had a deal with LORG. And at that point, he got, I think, like a 10 year licensing deal from them. So it was all, that part of it was legit by this point.
14:09 Josh Clark? Yeah, and at the time it was almost a hundred dollars for a copy of Tetris for IBM and 68 dollars. These are in today's dollars, I should say.
14:18 Speaker 02 Yeah.
14:19 Josh Clark? For the Commodore 64.
14:20 Speaker 02 That's not cheap.
14:21 Josh Clark? No, for sure not, but people were buying it because people liked it. And apparently also Mirasoft made deals with Atari and Sega too. To basically start producing Tetris cartridges for those consoles. And again, I think this was within that window where he didn't officially own any of the rights at the time.
14:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, he didn't have those rights. So you could have, it gets a little confusing, but you can have like PC rights, but not rights to do it on like a handheld game or like a stand up console arcade game or something like that. Or what was to come, which was, well, they already had Atari and stuff like that and Sega, like you mentioned. But you know, all these are different licenses and this guy Stein was just kind of going full steam ahead without even owning these licenses, basically saying like, hey, I'll get these. Don't worry.
15:09 Josh Clark? So yeah, so at the time, there was another guy that we've got to introduce. And then we'll take a break after, well, after that. His name was Henk Rogers, H E N K Rogers. He was Dutch born, but grew up in America. And at the time, he was working for a company called Bulletproof Software, a Japanese company. And his job was to find games to basically develop for the Japanese market. And one day in 1988, he was at CES in Las Vegas, looking for ideas. And one of the ideas that he came across Chuck was Tetris.
15:47 Speaker 02 What a pro. We'll be right back.
16:02 Speaker 04 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
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18:51 Josh Clark? Okay, so when we last saw Hank Rogers, he was wandering around CES with a pennant that said Bulletproof's Number One, eating some popcorn.
19:02 Josh Clark? And he had just stopped in front of this booth that was playing Tetris. And he dropped his popcorn and his pennant at the same time as mouth agog. And he was like, "I have to own this game. Like, we have to buy this game." And he wanted it himself, so much so that he talked his in-laws into putting up their house for collateral, so that he could have seed money to buy the rights to this game. And he actually traveled to Moscow. And this guy is where the Cold War stuff really starts to kind of come alive. Because he showed up in Moscow and was like, "Let's make a deal." And they're like, "That's not how it works, spy."
19:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, pretty much. I mean, at this point, he did make a deal with Spectrum Holobite for the Nintendo Famicom console.
19:51 Josh Clark? Right.
19:52 Speaker 02 And, you know, this is all early days. So the Game Boy had not quite debuted. That launched in 89, so it was, the timing of it was really, really key because as we'll see, the Game Boy is where it really, really took off. But he made a deal, sort of a handshake deal, with the president of Nintendo of America to put Tetris in Game Boys. And he was like, hey, listen, you know, you're selling these Game Boys, you're including Mario, which the boys love, but if you want to appeal to everyone and sell more of those, include Tetris. And I think that led to like 35 million units of Tetris Game Boy being sold.
20:27 Josh Clark? Yeah, it was essentially the same thing when Apple loaded that YouTube album onto their iPhones. It was one of the greatest commercial successes of all time. This is basically the predecessor of that.
20:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So you said he was sort of bumbling-
20:42 Josh Clark? I can't leave you with that. That was a joke. Like, that was a huge flop. Everybody hated that, just being like loaded on their phone. Apparently, you couldn't get it off either.
20:50 Speaker 02 Oh, no, no, no, I remember that. I think I was one of the few people that was like, oh, nice, I like YouTube. Thanks for the song.
20:56 Josh Clark? Thanks, suckers, for the free album that I paid $1,000 for.
21:00 Speaker 02 Goodness me. So you mentioned that he was sort of bumbling around Moscow and they were like, hey, no thanks, bye. He eventually did get that meeting with L-ORG because he's still trying to secure all these different, you know, license rights. And he, they weren't too pleased with him, but luckily for him, Pagetnov was in that meeting and he liked Rogers and they became buddies and that helped them secure the rights on the Game Boy.
21:24 Josh Clark? Yeah, because at the time, all of a sudden, there was a huge competition in Moscow for getting these rights because it became clear, Stein didn't own the rights, therefore Maxwell didn't own all of the rights, Nintendo didn't own all the rights yet. So Rogers was there, like, making these deals. And it is questionable whether he would have come out on top had Pagetnov not taken a shine to him. But he did. And like you said, he talked the head of Nintendo America into installing the game on every unit. And yeah, when you sell 35 million units of something, it's suddenly popular. That's when it finally blew up in the United States. Because again, it had been around for a few years by then, but when the Game Boy came out with it, that was it for Tetris. And also Nintendo was like,
22:08 Josh Clark? we're the Tetris platform now from now on.
22:11 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. And by the way, I did go to eBay. I haven't, I haven't picked the one out yet, but there are, there are plenty of Game Boys with Tetris cartridges. They're supposedly in good shape, so.
22:23 Josh Clark? That's awesome.
22:24 Speaker 02 I'm definitely looking forward to that. Although Emily says, "I still have mine somewhere." I was like, "All right, I'll just get it on eBay."
22:29 Josh Clark? You're like, "How hard can you look for that?"
22:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, and they're, they range in price. I think, you know, some of the more dubious ones are like 30 to 40 bucks. Uh, and I just wonder about the stickiness of buttons and pads and things, but, uh, the one that's like 110, I feel like is probably a safer bet, but who knows?
22:49 Josh Clark? Yeah, you gotta look out for that 40-year-old caramel sauce.
22:55 Speaker 02 Oh, God. Uh, yeah, and cotton candy and stuff like that. Uh, but the Game Boy one, though, the reason I bring that up again is because that's the one, uh, with that classic Type A theme song.
23:06 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah.
23:08 Speaker 02 Uh, from Sound Engineer, uh, Hiroko Tanaka, uh, which is hard to believe, but it's an actually a Russian folk song, uh, called Korobianiki, which means peddlers. And you can hear like a symphony doing that in a Russian symphony, and you're like, "Oh, wait a minute. I know that song."
23:27 Josh Clark? That's the Tetris song.
23:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's pretty cool.
23:30 Josh Clark? It is, and it's, uh, if you haven't heard it in a while, go just look up Tetris Type A Theme on YouTube, and it'll take you back for sure.
23:37 Speaker 02 Yeah.
23:37 Josh Clark? So, um, there was one more challenge for the rights to, um, Tetris, and that ended up being between Nintendo and Atari. Uh, like I said, Nintendo was like, "We're, we're the platform for Tetris. Just try it." And Atari was like, "We're gonna try you. So much, we're so confident that we're gonna produce hundreds of thousands of copies of this game." And a judge was like, "Nope, it's Nintendo's." And Atari had to eat the cost of all those.
24:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, the judge is like, "Don't you have a, a burial site for the..."
24:09 Josh Clark? Yeah, exactly. Can you repurpose that?
24:13 Speaker 02 So they've sold a lot of these, but marketing of the game initially was a challenge. It didn't have like cutting edge graphics or anything. You really had to play it to real to kind of understand how addictive it was. So just looking at the game and selling the game was tough. So they sort of weirdly at the time really leaned into the Cold War and the Soviet stuff. They reskinned it to have St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow on the title screen. They had all sorts of little Russian Easter eggs in there. At trade shows, they had Reagan and Gorbachev impersonators like playing against each other and stuff like that. And that actually helped sell the game as this like this weird import from behind the iron curtain. Like, what are they doing over there?
24:58 Josh Clark? Right. Yeah, that was funny. There was a New York Times article on it from, oh, I don't know, I think the like 86 maybe. And they were, they threw a little bit of shade. They're like, it's kind of impressive. This is the first software from the Soviet Union being sold in the US, which indicates that their computers are finally catching up to American computers.
25:20 Speaker 02 These IBM PCs.
25:22 Josh Clark? Right. So Tetris indisputably ended the Cold War, brought down the Soviet Union single-handedly. There were no other factors involved whatsoever. And like we said, the the rights for the game stayed with the USSR for the first 10 years. And then finally, when they came back around to, or for the first time, I guess, to Pajitnov, he just started lighting 10 cigars at once with hundred dollar bills because this is already just a worldwide smash hit. And now all of the royalties were going to start to come to him.
25:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, he didn't try to fight this early on. Like, you know, if it was in the United States, somebody would have taken him to court probably over the fact that like, yeah, I was your employee at the time, but blah, blah, blah. Like, he knew that was a lost cause. So he never even tried to fight back. And I think wanted to get in line as a good, as a good Russian state employer. And was like, okay, 10 years, you've got it. And, you know, turns out patience is a virtue because he made. You know, he did pretty well on this thing in the long run.
26:24 Josh Clark? Right. So these guys started drifting over to the United States and there's a really sad like kind of appendix to this whole thing. In 1998, Pokilko, who was the psychologist who was involved in developing it, found that he had, he was being looped out now that the rights were coming to Pagetoff and Rogers, who made a separate deal without him. He was running a relatively unsuccessful software company and apparently killed his wife and son with a knife and then killed himself with a knife, which is a weird enough thing that there's still today conspiracy theories that he was killed by Russian mobsters or the government
27:07 Josh Clark? or something like that. But a couple of autopsies confirmed like, no, this was suicide. It's really, really sad and just a weird little bizarre kind of side thing to be tacked on to, you know, what's just widely considered such a fun pastime around the world.
27:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, this, there's a documentary or docu-series rather called The Tetris Murders about this and I did not watch it, but I looked more into this and I'm not conspiracy minded at all, but this seems very, very pinky. There were three murder weapons to kill his wife and kid and himself. There were two different hammers and a hunting knife. Multiple murder weapons is just strange. There were documents burned on a grill. Everybody to a person they talked to were like, this guy was a super good dude, loving father and husband. Like, there's no way he could have done something this brutal. Apparently, the blood spatter analysis made no sense at all. And there were other people that
28:07 Speaker 02 were asked to sign off that were like, I'm not going to sign off on this. Like, there's no way this guy slit his own throat. Look at the blood. And they also found a note that they initially said was not a suicide note, but they would eventually say it was. And it said, "I've been eaten alive, Vladimir. Just remember that I am, exist, the devil."
28:29 Speaker 02 This is very strange.
28:30 Josh Clark? It is.
28:31 Speaker 02 So I don't know, it just, a lot of this stuff doesn't add up. So I'm not really sure what the deal is.
28:35 Josh Clark? No, for sure. I think the one criticism is that the docu-series doesn't actually say why anybody would have wanted to kill him and his family.
28:45 Josh Clark? But yes, everything-
28:45 Speaker 02 You should say Russian mobs, that's all you need to say.
28:48 Josh Clark? Yeah.
28:50 Josh Clark? Yeah, it does kind of explain a lot. So like you said, there's a movie, I think it's on Apple TV, that came out last year about this that you can see. I can't remember what it's called, Tetris something, right?
29:01 Speaker 02 I think it's just Tetris.
29:02 Josh Clark? Oh, okay.
29:03 Speaker 02 It's got what's his name, the Kingsman, Taran-
29:06 Josh Clark? Edgerton.
29:07 Speaker 02 Taran Edgerton, yeah.
29:08 Josh Clark? I think of him more as Alton John.
29:10 Speaker 02 I do too. I like that guy. I think he's a very talented actor.
29:14 Josh Clark? Oh, God, I hope he's not a monstrous scumbag.
29:17 Speaker 02 I do too. We walk that fine line of like, saying something nice about someone, are they a monstrous scumbag? Or say something bad about someone and we'll just get back to them.
29:28 Josh Clark? Right. Yeah, you have a good track record of calling it, though.
29:31 Speaker 02 Well, I got one. I got Jared back in the day, that's about it.
29:35 Josh Clark? That was a mega one. That was a huge whale to land. Nobody was thinking that about that guy.
29:42 Speaker 02 Speaking of that guy, should we take another break? Or should we talk about gameplay first?
29:46 Josh Clark? Well, we'll take another break, it feels like.
29:48 Speaker 02 All right, let's break and we'll talk about how you actually play this thing, right after this.
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32:36 Speaker 02 Okay, so if you want to play, if you've never played Tetris, you know, a lot of this kind of assumes with that many
32:43 Speaker 02 hundreds of millions of games sold, plus many more people that played that didn't actually buy it, that most people have probably played this game. But the idea is that you have this horizontal screen and these different shaped blocks are coming down. And when you do a complete horizontal line across with these different shaped blocks, that block, that line will disappear. And all this time, more blocks are falling and falling and falling. And the key is to get to different levels by completing more and more lines. And they start going faster and faster. And you can you can spin them to get them into position and into place. And in different versions of the game, you can see what's coming. Sometimes just one, sometimes a few. And there were other variations along the years.
33:27 Speaker 02 But that's the basic gameplay of Tetris. It's a very, very simple game.
33:31 Josh Clark? That was the best, basic, most succinct explanation of Tetris I have ever heard.
33:37 Speaker 02 Really? Was it good, though?
33:38 Josh Clark? For sure, yeah.
33:38 Speaker 02 OK.
33:39 Josh Clark? That's what I'm saying. It was the best.
33:40 Speaker 02 I just thought you meant it was short and that'll suffice.
33:43 Josh Clark? No, no, I thought it was great.
33:45 Speaker 02 OK, thanks.
33:46 Josh Clark? Because you could have gone on longer, but why? You said it all just precisely. So it was very economical and efficient, and I appreciate that.
33:53 Speaker 02 Thank you, friend.
33:54 Josh Clark? There's also multiplayer versions, which means that there's a lot of competitive Tetris championships. There's one in particular. And the classic Tetris World Championship, I believe, is the biggest of them all. But some of the things that they've come up with. So Tetris was just basically the same for a very long time. And then when the rights reverted to Pejatnov, they started experimenting with it, making it a little different, some of which you included in there. But one of the things that is pretty cool about multiplayer play is that when you start doing things like if you clear multiple lines at once, it's a Tetris combo, you can be rewarded by garbage being thrown to your player's screen. And that'll be a few lines, sometimes a bunch of lines,
34:39 Josh Clark? that have a really inconvenient break in the line, which makes it really hard to clear. And also, it just pushed their regular screen up that much closer to the top, which is where you die, if you can die in Tetris. So there's a lot of kind of interesting things that they did with this really basic game that didn't seem like it could be improved upon without really just being unnecessary. They seem to have come up with some really good ideas for it.
35:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, and I think, did you mention, I don't, that a true Tetris is when you get...
35:11 Speaker 02 What is it? I guess four levels at once?
35:13 Josh Clark? Yeah, when you, when you throw down that coveted eye piece.
35:17 Speaker 02 So satisfying.
35:18 Josh Clark? And yeah, exactly. That's, that is a Tetris.
35:21 Speaker 02 Oh, boy, that's a satisfying. I remember that feeling. I can't wait to get that Game Boy. Should we talk about the pieces? Because you found some kind of cool stuff, as did Libya, that I never knew is that these pieces have names.
35:33 Josh Clark? Yeah, there's a bunch of slang names. There's a Tetris Wiki that has a bunch of slang names, but somebody posted on Reddit a few years ago and the original Nintendo manual for it, and it has like the official Nintendo names. So we'll give you all of them or some of them.
35:49 Speaker 02 All right. The J and the, and the shape also refers to, or the, the letter refers to sort of the shape of the piece, right?
35:55 Josh Clark? Yes.
35:56 Speaker 02 Okay. So the J is the blue one. I never knew that there were colors because on Game Boy, obviously, it was not colored in the initial ones. But the blue one can also be called the Gamma or the, the, the Ghee or GE, or I think the official, the Blue Ricky.
36:12 Josh Clark? The Blue Ricky. Yeah, that's the official one.
36:14 Speaker 02 What else?
36:14 Josh Clark? There's an Orange Ricky. That's the L piece, which is basically the mirror of the J. It's also called Jed or Right Elbow. Orange Ricky, you don't really, you can't improve on that. It sounds like a disgusting drink.
36:29 Speaker 02 Yeah.
36:29 Josh Clark? You know, like a creamsicle.
36:31 Speaker 02 Cruise ship drink.
36:32 Josh Clark? Gin Ricky.
36:33 Speaker 02 Yeah.
36:35 Speaker 02 Oh, boy. You might be on to something. What is a Gin Ricky?
36:39 Josh Clark? It's gin, lime, and I think a little sweetener, maybe. It's really simple. I think club soda. It's a pretty old drink.
36:48 Speaker 02 So kind of like a gin and tonic without, but with soda instead of tonic and a little sweet?
36:52 Josh Clark? Yeah. Yes, I believe so. I think that's a pretty good description. Man, you're just killing it with the descriptions today.
36:59 Speaker 02 How about this? The yellow cube? It's a square.
37:02 Josh Clark? Oh, my God. Genius.
37:05 Speaker 02 That's known, you can call it the square, or the zero, or the Smash Boy.
37:10 Josh Clark? Yeah, that's the official name of Smash Boy. Can't improve on that one either. The S is the green piece, it's the right-facing zigzag piece. Some people call it the right zigzag, or right squiggly, but the official Nintendo name was the Rhode Island Z.
37:26 Speaker 02 That sounds like a sex position.
37:28 Josh Clark? It does, for sure. Wow, that's great.
37:31 Speaker 02 Uh, Z, there is a Z, is the mirror, the red mirror of the Z, and that is, you can call it a lightning bolt, or the left dog, or the left snake, or the Cleveland Z, also, what I said before.
37:43 Josh Clark? Yeah. It's just more disappointing than the Rhode Island.
37:53 Josh Clark? There's the T, the T piece, that actually is used in the Tetris logo. And the T is called the T-Wee.
38:02 Speaker 02 The T-Wee, okay, and then that, oh god, that, I called it the I-beam, but that's the Cyan four-line clear. That's also the one that if you, if you put it in the wrong place, it can really screw you. But that, that can produce that full Tetris. You can call it the stick, the line, the Slim Jim, the long skinny one.
38:23 Josh Clark? The Hero is the official name for it, though.
38:26 Speaker 02 Oh, okay, that makes sense.
38:29 Josh Clark? That's where that song, that Enrique Iglesias song comes from. It's about Tetris. Little-known fact.
38:35 Speaker 02 So, did you mention the championship?
38:39 Josh Clark? No, yes, I did, the classic Tetris World Championship, that's the big one, and they still use the original NES version, the one that I played, and Yumi played, and everybody but you played, apparently.
38:50 Speaker 02 That's right, which is a key distinction when it comes to competing, I guess, because I would have been, I would have been pretty lost, although there's no way I could, I wasn't like, competition level, I was just okay at it, but.
39:01 Josh Clark? Dude, competition level is insane when it comes to Tetris.
39:05 Speaker 02 No, when you watch like, real-time speeds of what these people are doing, it's crazy, like, that's when I'm. Like, I mean, I'm way done by that, by the time they start going that fast.
39:15 Josh Clark? Yeah, because the Nintendo controller, the original one, the rectangle with two buttons, like two red buttons and then a D-pad, the directional pad. Like, it's, it works for certain kinds of games and certain kind of movements, usually with two thumbs. But with Tetris, the big part is to move the piece around. And you want to move a lot of pieces really fast and move on to the next one.
39:39 Speaker 02 As you're spinning them.
39:41 Josh Clark? Yes, which means that you have to, you have to press the D-pad really fast. And the D-pad was not made for being pressed fast. So like you said, people have come up with some amazing techniques for competitive play.
39:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, if you're trying to get something going down, that's coming down very, very fast, all the way over and fit it on, on the left side of the screen and it's dropped on the right, you gotta hit that D-pad like, go, go, go, go, go. And you can only do that, like, you know, there's, there's, humans can only go so fast until they invented hyper-tapping, which was about 2011, according to Livia's research, which I've found that to be pretty much true. Early 2010s, it checks out.
40:24 Speaker 02 That means you're like, you're sort of vibrating your thumb, actually, instead of pressing it, you're sort of vibrating, you're like flexing your bicep. So you're not fully releasing and pressing, it's just like a hyper-press, a hyper-tap.
40:38 Josh Clark? Right, so if you're, if you're trying that right now and you're like, I don't see how that works. Apparently, a very, very few gifted individuals can actually hyper-tap, which means that hyper-tappers dominated competition for a good 10 or so years, about 10 years. There was a kid named Joseph Sealy, or Sealy, I'm sorry, Joseph. And he was 16 at the time, back in 2018. He reached level 31. I don't think we said, just using like normal movements on the NES controller, no one makes it past level 29.
41:14 Speaker 02 Yeah.
41:15 Josh Clark? You just don't. This kid made it to level 31 using hyper-tapping in 2018. He made it to level 35 in 2020. So at the time, that makes him the greatest Tetris player of all time to that point.
41:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, so then in 2020, comes along a guy named Christopher Martinez, also known as Cheese, capital C, capital Z.
41:36 Josh Clark? Yeah, I think the capital Z makes it Cheezy.
41:39 Speaker 02 Oh, but you're probably right.
41:40 Josh Clark? That's my take on it.
41:42 Speaker 02 No, I think you're totally right.
41:43 Josh Clark? Okay, well, we should say Christopher Martinez, AKA Cheese, AKA Cheezy, and we'll get it in there somewhere.
41:51 Speaker 02 So he introduced a technique called rolling. It's also called fly hecking, H-E-C-C-I-N-G, after a guy named Hector Fly Rodriguez, who developed this technique on arcade game consoles, not even for Tetris, just on arcade game console, like, you know, how to press the buttons faster. And I'm gonna do a little audio, Josh, if you'll allow.
42:14 Josh Clark? Yeah, please.
42:15 Speaker 02 Because did you see how this was done? Did you see Hector's fingers?
42:19 Josh Clark? I did.
42:20 Speaker 02 It's amazing. The, this guy has like, they look like breakdancing fingers. They're just so fluid. But it's, if you imagine like a stand-up arcade game and those big round buttons, if you want to press that really fast, you can go tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap with one finger. Or you can do this with your four fingers.
42:41 Josh Clark? Very nice.
42:42 Speaker 02 Did that come through, you think?
42:43 Josh Clark? Good, fully work.
42:44 Speaker 02 So that's what he's doing. He's using all four fingers to, you know, kind of like the I'm bored thing when you do that on a table. He did that on a button and found like, boy, that's even faster than the fastest hyper tapping. And Cheezy, Cheese, uh, I don't know if stole that, but he got that from him. So what you do in the case of a Nintendo, because they have tiny little buttons, you can't do that with your four fingies.
43:07 Josh Clark? No.
43:08 Speaker 02 You hold the D-pad down just enough for it to engage, and then you do that to the back of the thing, and it essentially is making your D-pad move that fast because it's already engaged and you're going really fast.
43:25 Josh Clark? Right, to the back of the controller, right?
43:26 Speaker 02 To the back of the controller, making the back of the controller essentially one large button.
43:31 Josh Clark? Yeah, and it's just kind of jumping up and hitting your thumb. That was another great explanation Chuck.
43:37 Speaker 02 Man, that's a tough one because you really got to see it in action.
43:40 Josh Clark? But you still, you did it great. Hyper tapping, the best hyper tappers can hit the button about seven times a second, which is mind boggling.
43:50 Speaker 02 What about a roller?
43:51 Josh Clark? With rolling, people like Cheesy can hit it 20 times a second.
43:55 Speaker 02 What?
43:56 Josh Clark? 20 times a second. And Cheesy obviously was starting to reach new heights as well. He's, I believe, still one of the premier Tetris players in the world. And it started to get people like between Joseph Sayley and Christopher or Cheesy.
44:11 Josh Clark? Like, they're like, okay, people can get past level 29. How many levels do you think there are in Tetris? And of course, there's not like some, some point where the Nintendo developers were like, okay, that's it. You won the game at level 100. Just like many other games, they just let it go and go and go. And then eventually, the game just stops functioning. There's some zero that doesn't get carried or some number resets. You read some crazy bit configuration and the thing just crashes. But that's just never been done with Tetris because they figured out using bots, that it was somewhere between level 155 and the mid 200s, right?
44:52 Josh Clark? 29 is where the best normal players max out. In the 30s is where Joseph Sayley was maxing out. This is like up to like 250 and there was a kid who
45:05 Speaker 02 Oh, man.
45:06 Josh Clark? beat the game Chuck. A human, not a bot, a kid. I've seen him with my own eyes on the TV and he was not a bot.
45:14 Speaker 02 How old was he? What's his name? Give this kid his due.
45:16 Josh Clark? He was 13 years old at the time. This is December of 2023. So about a year ago. He was in Oklahoma. His name was Willis Gibson. Blue Scooty was his player name.
45:28 Speaker 02 Yeah.
45:30 Speaker 02 Are you gonna drop the level?
45:31 Josh Clark? I think you should.
45:32 Speaker 02 All right. This guy, after playing for 38 minutes, hit level 157 and crashed five times as much as the best players in the world. And crashed the system. And every, does it say "system"?
45:47 Josh Clark? That's how excited you are.
45:48 Speaker 02 This is very weird, I was. And everybody was going crazy over this kid, except for Pagetnoff, who said, "Yes, well, you know, you beat the 40-year-old version of the game. Nice accomplishment."
46:01 Josh Clark? Right, yeah. He said that Tetris itself, the pure, like, the theoretical version of the game, you could never beat it.
46:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, I get it, I guess, but come on, man.
46:11 Josh Clark? I know, I thought that too. Like, it's a 13-year-old you're talking to, buddy.
46:16 Speaker 02 All right, should we talk a little, we'll finish with Tetris on the brain, because we started the show talking about Tetris getting into your dreams, getting into your, when you're packing your car. I still call that Tetris-ing, as do a lot of people when you're packing stuff, packing, moving trucks. It's kind of the vernacular now, but it does have very distinct impacts on your brain, right? And usually in a good way.
46:38 Josh Clark? Yeah, again, we said it was called the Tetris effect. There is a guy named Jeffrey Goldsmith, who is a writer, who is known for coining, I don't know if he coined a term, or just was the first to apply it to Tetris, but he called Tetris a pharmatronic, which is like an addictive drug, but in software form. And Pagetnoff, ever the contrarian, said like, "No, it's more like an earworm."
47:01 Speaker 02 Right.
47:03 Speaker 02 What is it with this guy?
47:04 Josh Clark? I don't know, he likes to be right, I think. But, so, yeah, so people have taken wide note of the fact that Tetris seems to be way more addictive on way more people than just about any other game. And so people have kind of investigated what the, what the deal is behind that. I know at least one writer chalked it up to what's called the Ziggerinik effect.
47:28 Speaker 02 That is super cool. That was coined by a psychologist in Russia, Bluma. Well, Zigerink, or I'm sorry, Zigernick.
47:36 Josh Clark? Mm-hmm. Bluma, what a great first name.
47:39 Speaker 02 I think it's Zigernick.
47:40 Josh Clark? Okay. Well, you know me and EIs and European pronunciations.
47:45 Speaker 02 I know. This is in the 1930s and she noticed that at restaurants, when a server had a large table of like, let's say 12 people, they could remember their orders, which was remarkable, but then when it came time to deliver food to the table, they had forgotten them. So the idea here is that the, you know, with the Zigernick effect is that the brain really, really wants to store information about a task that isn't complete yet.
48:10 Josh Clark? Right.
48:11 Speaker 02 Like taking an order for 12, or in the case of Tetris, they're exploiting it by like constantly creating a little unfinished mission to create a line of blocks that you get fulfilled and then they drop another one. So it's just triggering this constant feeling of satisfaction because you're completing these tasks by completing these lines over and over and over.
48:33 Josh Clark? And then after you complete one, you have another task to do. So your brain is activated again. Like you said, moment by moment, over and over and over again.
48:42 Speaker 02 Pretty cool.
48:43 Josh Clark? It is super cool. There is another guy named Richard Hayer, or I'm sure in your pronunciation, Hayer, who in 1991, back in, yeah, in 91, at UC Irvine, he actually scanned the brains of Tetris players. And he found that the brain is much more engaged when you're new to Tetris, which is probably a reason why it became such a popular game. It just sucks in new players. And that you, you start using way more energy in your brain when you start playing Tetris and then it kind of goes down over time as you get better. And that apparently is when most people stop playing Tetris after a while, when they get really good at it, because the brain's no longer being challenged like it was originally, thanks to the Zigernick effect.
49:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. There have been other studies, of course. There was one that found that Tetris may reduce the strength of cravings. This was in 2015 by the British and Australian psychologists.
49:42 Speaker 02 Oh.
49:43 Josh Clark? The British. Is that a band?
49:47 Speaker 02 I thought that was the name of the, yeah.
49:50 Speaker 02 It's like a British sea power, one of my favorite bands.
49:52 Josh Clark? Right.
49:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, so just by psychologists in Britain and Australia, I think.
49:57 Josh Clark? Got it.
49:58 Speaker 02 Basically where they used iPods to check in with undergraduates seven times a day to see if they are craving drugs, food, sex, and other things.
50:06 Josh Clark? They just said, yes.
50:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, that you might crave. Yeah, they're like, we're undergrads, duh. And playing Tetris for three minutes lessen the cravings.
50:17 Speaker 02 I am curious if that's just because they're preoccupied with it. They argued that it was effective because it involves, because cravings involve working memory and visualizing the object of desire. So maybe that is it. You're occupied with another cognitive task so much that you're not thinking about the heroin you want to do in your desk drawer.
50:36 Josh Clark? Right, and one of the great things about cravings is if you can ride it out or distract yourself or something like that, when you come back from that task, your brain very rarely goes right back to the craving.
50:46 Speaker 02 Yeah.
50:46 Josh Clark? That's amazing. They also figured out for probably the exact same reasons, or similar reasons, they believe that it can prevent PTSD from forming, which is a little weird. It's like, you just had a traumatic experience, quick play Tetris.
51:02 Speaker 02 Right.
51:02 Josh Clark? More likely, it will help you get, treat PTSD, very similar to EMDR, where you watch like a pen or a ball on a screen or something like that. This is playing Tetris while you're recounting your traumatic experience. Your memory recatalogs it to something far less traumatic, thanks to your working memory being occupied while you're doing this other thing, too. It's, we should do an episode on EMDR someday. It's just insane how effective it can be.
51:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. I'd be way into that. They also found that potentially your brain might physically change. And then if you play Tetris enough, you might have a thicker cerebral cortices and more flexible cortical matter. So maybe your cognitive functioning and memory could improve. Although there have been other studies. Weirdly, this is very strange to me, they found that playing Tetris does not improve things like spatial cognition. And you would think that's the one thing it would help with.
52:03 Josh Clark? Yeah, I think it still helps with visiospatial like arrangement, like you said, packing a car.
52:09 Speaker 02 Oh, OK.
52:09 Josh Clark? But it doesn't, you can't see something and be like, how's, what's right side up for this shape that I'm showing you a picture of? You can't just immediately say like, oh, it should be to the left or something like that, like, like, just that specific thing. I think it still does help, although I didn't see any studies. It's just, how could it not, you know?
52:27 Speaker 02 I, I agree. Studies be damned.
52:30 Josh Clark? You got anything else on Tetris?
52:32 Speaker 02 I have nothing else. I can't wait for that Game Boy. I'll report back with pictures at Chuck the Podcaster Instagram.
52:38 Josh Clark? Oh, nice.
52:39 Speaker 02 I gotta put those kudzu pictures up. Hadn't done it.
52:42 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah, you need to, man.
52:44 Speaker 02 Yeah.
52:45 Josh Clark? Yeah, you got to. You put it on the podcast, you gotta deliver, Chuck.
52:49 Speaker 02 I have to deliver, Josh.
52:51 Josh Clark? Well, since Chuck says he has to deliver, and that was in agreement to me saying he has to deliver, obviously, we've unlocked listener mail.
53:01 Speaker 02 Uh, this is a timely one because our, our bet date has passed. We got a few of these from people. Hey, guys, I'm from Brazil and I started listening to your show during the pandemic, but I love those older episodes and I was recently listening to one from November 2019, augmented reality coming soon. At the beginning of the episode, Josh and Clark, we get that a lot. That's OK. I'm sure my tombstone will say, Charles W. Chuck Clark Bryant.
53:31 Josh Clark? I will see to it that it does if I allow you.
53:35 Speaker 02 Well, I'm gonna be between you and Yumi, so you can constantly just be talking over me.
53:39 Josh Clark? OK, good.
53:40 Speaker 02 Uh, that's what we should do. You should do Yumi, me, you, Emily.
53:44 Josh Clark? OK.
53:45 Speaker 02 And then we're not gonna talk about pets or children, because that's too sad.
53:48 Josh Clark? What if we just did like a mass burial together and saved some money?
53:51 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, just, or a sky burial, throw us all up in a mountain and let the crows eat us or whatever, vultures.
53:56 Josh Clark? Yeah, but I'm sure shipping our cadavers would be kind of expensive.
54:00 Speaker 02 That's true. All right, well, we'll work this out.
54:01 Josh Clark? OK.
54:03 Speaker 02 Anyway, Josh and Clark made a bet that in five years, augmented reality glasses would be all the rage, uh, because Josh said that he thought they would be commonplace by Halloween 2024. Here we are, Josh. What do you think?
54:18 Josh Clark? That doesn't sound like something I'd say in retrospect.
54:22 Speaker 02 Well, Alisa says, I think Chuck won this one. It is funny, though. Recently, someone I know saw me, I had my camera, because it was an event, I was taking pictures. And I said, can I take your picture? And he said, sure. And I took his picture. Then he went, now can I take yours? And he touched his glasses and looked at me and walked away. And I was like, that dude's wearing photography glasses.
54:46 Josh Clark? You didn't chase after him?
54:48 Speaker 02 No, I knew the guy. Those Meta Ray-Bans that you can like, whatever, interact online through your glasses. Basically, what they're... Yeah, that's what you thought would be commonplace, I think.
54:58 Josh Clark? You didn't chase after him and say like, hey, I never said yes?
55:01 Speaker 02 Uh, no, I didn't. Just thought I'd expose it here.
55:06 Josh Clark? There you go. Now we know. You want to say his name and street address?
55:10 Speaker 02 I do not.
55:11 Josh Clark? All right. Well, since Chuck told an anecdote about an anonymous friend using Google Glasses, and I lost the bet, then we have to sign off by thanking whoever wrote this email. Who was it again?
55:23 Speaker 02 Alisa from Brazil.
55:25 Josh Clark? Oh, that's right. Thanks a lot, Alisa from Brazil. We appreciate it big time. Thank you for pointing out that I lost a bet to Chuck. Hopefully, there was no money on it, was there? Do you know?
55:35 Speaker 02 Uh, no money, as far as I'm concerned.
55:38 Josh Clark? And if you want to be like Alisa from Brazil, you can email us as well at [email protected] .
55:47 Speaker 03 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, MyHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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57:01 Josh Clark? Introducing Voices of VivGart. VivGart is also known as its generic name, Fgart Tigamod Alpha F Cab. And this new show features firsthand stories from people living with a rare disease. Hosted by Andrew Stratton, these perspectives highlight that life is more than a moment, a condition, or a tough day. Living with a rare disease can be challenging, but it does not define the Voices of VivGart. In these episodes, they share their stories, from diagnosis to working with their care team on their treatment plan. Listen to Voices of VivGart on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
57:34 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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