TITLE
This Is Your Brain on Tetris
AUTHOR
Jeffrey Goldsmith
PUBLICATION
Wired
YEAR
1994
ARTICLE TYPE
Article
FROM THE ARTICLE
Did Alexey Pajitnov invent a pharmatronic?Ten years ago, a gleam lit Alexey Pajitnov’s eyes. As an AI man in Moscow, Pajitnov had designed games for fun until an ancient Roman puzzle, Pentamino, made him blink. He tweaked its simple geometric formations into real time. And thus, with brackets delineating blocks, Tetris was born.
Even spanking new, Tetris was so addictive that Pajitnov himself was instantly hooked. He laughs, “You can’t imagine. I couldn’t finish the prototype! I started to play and never had time to finish the code. People kept playing, playing, playing. My best friend said, ‘I can’t live with your Tetris anymore.'”
That friend, former clinical psychologist Vladimir Pokhilko, recalls, “When I met Alexey, I had heard about Tetris. He gave it to me and I took it to my lab at the Moscow Medical Institute. Everybody stopped working. So I deleted it from every computer.” Everyone went back to work, until a new version appeared in the lab.
Tetris changed Pokhilko’s life.
GAMES MENTIONED
Tetris
PEOPLE MENTIONED
Alexey Pajitnov
TOPICS MENTIONED
Flow State
PRINT AVAILABILITY
May 1994 (Volume 2, Issue 5)