BBC Documentary on the history of Tetris

[zaphod]

There is a youtube video of a 2004 documentary all about tetris and it's origins. Pretty interesting stuff especially if you are amused by russian accents.

:arrow: devbump story: http://devbump.com/story.php?title=story-Tetris

:arrow: actual video: http://www.kottke.org/06/10/the-story-of-tetris

[Mazy]

Planned on watching it last week, but I forgot~~now I remember again!

[Bic-B@ll]

my cell phone wants 8 dollars for me to play tetris

[Furyo]

Thx so much for posting this, I spent today's lunch break watching it and it is simply brilliant. I passed it around the whole studio too.

[zaphod]

cool stuff like this pops up a lot on devbump but I try not to post it all on here.

The part I loved was when nintendo goes over to russia and secures the rights to console tetris knowing that atari was already producing game cartridges and giggling like little school girls. Also amazing I thought was the fact that the guy went to work for microsoft and still works there making games, his mobygames profile lists his last game as project gotham racing in 2003.

[Warby]

good stuff i knew most of the story .. so of course the gabs in my knowledge were the juiciest parts for me =)

so was this all archive footage + interviews or were some of the older shots staged and that artificial aged ( i suspect that of a couple of scenes )

[Bl1tz]

This was an awesome documentary. I remember reading about the Tetris saga way back in a magazine (it was probably NextGen when NextGen was a good magazine) but this was a great refresher + some new tidbits I didn't know about.

The depressing thing is that Pajitnov would probably be a very very rich man right now considering the insane number of units Tetris sold (they said it sold 7 million on the NES alone) but he never saw a dime of it. You'd think he would be really upset and bitter but he seems happy enough that he has the chance to make his living making games, and he strikes me as a really cool guy.