Stuff You Should Know - The Wild History of Tetris

Episode Date: November 26, 2024

Tetris is an iconic game with a fascinating history. Dive in today to learn all about this classic puzzle game.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Dasvidaniya and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know, comrade. Yeah, the Tetris edition. How much Tetris have you played?

What's your background there? 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. And where did you play it? Like what system? On the NES, the classic NES. How about you, Chuck? What is your relationship to Tetris? 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 like 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. Yeah. I tried playing it on computer, and I was like, I can't get this. I'm just used to the NES controller for it. 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 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 right 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. Yeah, I was asking Yumi, I was like,

did you ever play Tetris? And she just kind of 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. Yeah, I could see that. 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. 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 I-beam into, then it's in your bones.

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. 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 it's 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.

Yeah. Closing in on 550 million copies. Wow. Yeah. That is a staggering number of people, man. Right. And this is, this video game hasn't been around since like the 1800s, like it's from 1984. It's not Oregon Trail.

Right, right, exactly. You can't catch Diss and Terry playing it. No, and big thanks to Livia 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 kind of forgot about, so I asked Livia to put this together, and I'm gonna watch the movie sometime this week, I think. So is that huge chase scene where Alexey Pajitnov

is chasing the CIA agents across rooftops in Istanbul and catches up with them and kills them with a garrot is made up? I think he, I think it is. And he was throwing Tetris pieces at them and building Tetris walls. That's he, I think it is. And he was throwing Tetris pieces at them and building Tetris walls. That's the movie they should have done.

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. 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, Alexey Pajitnov. 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 Gerad Nitsyn Computer Center, Cintra,

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 Pentomino. I'm glad, yes, you said it.

It took me a little while and I was like, oh, like domino, but with five. 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. Right, so yeah, he basically took that and adapted it into, he's like, well, I'm gonna totally revolutionize this. I'm gonna change the shapes from five boxes to four. And so you can't call it Pentomino anymore because pent is what? Five in Greek or Latin, something like that.

Right. Yeah. Five squares. Yeah. 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. Yeah, yeah, in 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 Pentomino. It was a horizontal square with these pieces that you would click, I don't know if you dragged at that point or not.

Did they even have the mouse at that point? I don't know. 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. That's it. Did you say that there weren't any graphics that they were like characters and punctuation marks instead of graphics?

No. So yeah. That was the first version. 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 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 Dmitri Pavlovsky who was also working on games, and there was a 16 year old involved, young lad named Vadim Gerasimov, 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,

and you put the four of them together and you have the earliest developers of Tetris. Yeah, he was interested in doing puzzles in relation to his psychological experiments. Gerasimov and the other guy, Pavlovsky, were porting games over to IBM PCs, 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 profit from this one day, but that's gonna be a tricky thing

because this is Soviet Union and everything that we do belongs to state. Yeah, that was a great yoke of Smirnoff, by the way. I appreciate that. Yeah, so as we'll see, the developers, Pezhinov 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, the game started to spread. We mentioned Pokiolko.

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? And apparently the workers played so often that they had to delete it from their computers because they just couldn't be trusted with Tetris on their computers to get their work done. 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. 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 a, or I guess he got a hold of a Telex number

that could reach Pajitnov, 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. Right.

So he actually started creating copies of it, right? And getting ready to sell it in the West. Is that correct? 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, uh, because 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. They literally made a deal with a guy named Robert Maxwell, British newspaper mogul, there's a lot more to this guy than we could probably do a whole episode on him. But he had a couple of companies, one called Spectrum Holobyte in the United States and one called Mirrorsoft in the UK, and he made licensing deals for PC and console rights

with Mirrorsoft for the UK and Europe for 3,000 pounds plus royalties. And then for Spectrum Holobyte for North America and Japan for 11,000 plus royalties when he didn't even own the rights to do so at this point. Yeah, so apparently they were out there selling units and then the Russians got word of this, something called Lorg, Electronorg Technika,

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 were like, hey, you can't do this anymore. Like, we own that. This is, even Cold War stuff says that this is wrong. You know?

Right. Yeah, so in January 29th, 88, Spectrum Holobyte released it in the U.S. and he didn't get his deal signed with L-Org, 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 L-Org, 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. Yeah, and at the time it was almost $100 for a copy of Tetris for IBM and $68. These are in today's dollars I should say, for the Commodore 64.

That's not cheap. No, for sure not, but people were buying it because people liked it. And apparently also, Mirosoft 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. 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 standup 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 license, basically saying like, hey, I'll get these, don't worry.

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 Hank 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. What a pro. We'll be right back. Okay, so when we last saw Hank Rogers, he was wandering around CES with a pennant that said bulletproofs number one, eating some popcorn. And he had just stopped in front of this booth

that was playing Tetris, and he dropped his popcorn and his pendant at the same time as Mouth-a-Gog. 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. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, at this point, he did make a deal and they're like, that's not how it works, spy. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, at this point, he did make a deal

with Spectrum Holobyte for the Nintendo Famicom console. Right. And this is all early days. So the Game Boy had not quite debuted. That launched in 89. So 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'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.

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. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So you said he was sort of bumbling. 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. Oh, no, no, no, I remember that. I think I was one of the few people that was like, oh, nice, I like you too, thanks for the song. Thanks suckers for the free album that I paid $1,000 for. Goodness me.

So you mentioned that he was sort of bumbling around Moscow and they were like, hey, no thanks, spy. He eventually did get that meeting with L.O.R.G. because he's still trying to secure all these different license rights. And they weren't too pleased with him, but luckily for him, Pajitnov was in that meeting and he liked Rogers and they became buddies

and that helped them secure the rights on the Gameboy. 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 Pejotnouf 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. Cause 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, we're the Tetris platform now from now on.

Yeah, for sure. And by the way, I did go to eBay. I haven't picked the one out yet, but there are plenty of Game Boys with Tetris cartridges that are supposedly in good shape. That's awesome. 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.

You're like, how hard can you look for that? Yeah, and they range in price. I think some of the more dubious ones are like 30 to 40 bucks. And I just wonder about the stickiness of buttons and pads and things. But the one that's like 110, I feel like is probably a safer bet, but who knows. Yeah, you gotta look out for that 40-year-old caramel sauce. Oh, God. Yeah, and cotton candy and stuff like that.

But the Game Boy one, though, the reason I bring that up again is because that's the one with that classic type a theme song from sound engineer Hirokazu Tanaka, which is hard to believe but it's an actually a Russian folk song called Koro Bioniki, 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. That's the Tetris song. Yeah, it's pretty cool. It is, and 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. So there was one more challenge for the rights to Tetris and that ended up being between Nintendo and Atari. So there was one more challenge for the rights to Tetris, and that ended up being between Nintendo and Atari. Like I said, Nintendo was like, 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. Yeah, the judge was like, don't you have a burial site for the heating thing around here? Can you repurpose that? So they 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 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? 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 there, like, it's kind of impressive. This is the first software from the Soviet Union being sold in the U.S., which indicates that their computers are finally catching up to American computers. These IBM PCs. Right. That's funny. up to American computers. Right. These IBM PCs. 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 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 against Pajitnov, he just started lighting 10 cigars at once with $100 bills, because this is already just a worldwide smash hit, and now all of the royalties were gonna start to come to him. 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 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. 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 Wrights were coming to Pazhitnov 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 or something like that. But a couple of autopsies confirm 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 what's just widely considered such a fun pastime around the world.

Yeah, 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 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. It's very strange. It is. 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.

No, for sure. I think the one criticism is that the docuseries doesn't actually say why anybody would have wanted to kill him and his family. But yes, everything I read... You should say Russian mob. That's all you need to say. Yeah.

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? I think it's just Tetris. Oh, okay. It's got what's his name? The Kingsman, Taron.

Edgerton. Taron Edgerton, yeah. I think of him more as Alton John. I do too. I like that guy. I think he's a very talented actor. Oh God, I hope he's not a monstrous scumbag. 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 are they a monstrous scumbag, or say something bad about someone, and we'll just get back to them. Right, yeah, you have a good track record of calling it though.

Well, I got one. I got Jared back in the day, that's about it. That was a mega one. That was a huge whale to land. Nobody was thinking that about that guy. Speaking of that guy, should we take another break or should we talk about gameplay first? We'll take another break, it feels like. Alright, let's break and we'll talk about how you actually play this thing right after this. 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

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 know, you have this horizontal screen and these different shape blocks are coming down. And when you do a complete horizontal line across

with these different shaped blocks, 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 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 are other variations along the years, but that's the basic gameplay of Tetris. It's a very, very simple game. That was the best, basic, most succinct explanation of Tetris I have ever heard.

Was it good, though? For sure, yeah. Okay. That's what I'm saying, it was the best. I just thought you meant that it was short, and that'll suffice. No, no, I thought it was great For sure, yeah. Okay. That's what I'm saying. It was the best. I just thought you meant it was short and that'll suffice. No, no, I thought it was great. Okay, thanks.

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. Thank you, friend. 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 Pejetnoff, 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 screen and that'll be you know a few lines sometimes a bunch of lines that have like 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 like a lot of like 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. Yeah, and I think, did you mention that a true Tetris is when you get, what is it, I guess four levels at once? Yeah, when you throw down that coveted eye piece. So satisfying. And yeah, exactly, that is a Tetris. 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?

Cause you found some kind of cool stuff, as did Livia, that I never knew, is that these pieces have names. 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.

All right. The J and the shape also refers to or the letter refers to sort of the shape of the piece, right? Yes. 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. 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 G or G-E or I think the official, the blue Ricky. The blue Ricky, yeah, that's the official one.

What else? 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. Yeah.

You know, like a creamsicle. Cruise ship drink. Gin Ricky. Yeah. Oh boy. You might be onto something. What is a gin Ricky? Um, 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. So kind of like a gin and tonic without, but with soda instead of tonic and a little sweet? Yeah. Yes, I believe so. I think that's a pretty good description. Sounds good to me.

Man, you're just killing it with the descriptions today. How about this? The yellow cube, it's a square. Oh my God. Genius. That's known, you can call it a square, or the zero, or the Smash Boy. 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. That sounds like a sex position. It does, for sure. Wow, that's great.

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. Yeah, it's just more disappointing than the road. Right. Oh, there's the T, the T piece that actually

is used in the Tetris logo and the T is called the Tiwi. The Tiwi, okay. And then that, oh god, I called it the I-beam. But that's the cyan four-line clear. That's also the one that if you put it in the wrong place, it can really screw you. But that can produce that full Tetris. You can call it the stick, the line, the slim gem,

the long skinny one. The hero is the official name for it though. Oh, okay, that makes sense. That's where that song, that Enrique Iglesias song comes from. It's about Tetris, little known fact. So did you mention the championship? No, yes I did.

The Classic Tetris World Championship, that's the big one. And they still use the championship? Uh, no, uh, 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 you played and everybody but you played, apparently. That's right, which is a key distinction when it comes to competing, I guess. Because 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, um... Dude, competition level is insane when it comes to Tetris. 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 the time they start going that fast. 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. 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. As you're spinning them.

Yes. Which means that 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. Yeah, if you're trying to get something going down, that's coming down very, very fast, all the way over and fitted 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, 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. to Livia's research, which I've found that to be pretty much true. That was a weird thing to say. Early 2010s, it checks out. 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. Right. So 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 normal movements on the NES controller, no one makes it past level 29. You just don't. This kid made it to level 31 using hypertapping 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. Yeah, so then in 2020 comes along a guy named Christopher Martinez, also known as Cheese, capital Z. Yeah, I think the capital Z makes it Cheese Z. Oh, but you're probably right. That's my take on it. No, I think you're totally right.

Okay, well we should say Christopher Martinez, aka cheese, aka cheese-y, and we'll get it in there somewhere. 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 how to press the buttons faster.

And I'm gonna do a little audio, Josh, if you'll allow. Yeah, please. Because did you see how this was done? Did you see Hector's fingers? I did. It's amazing. This guy has like, they look like break dancing fingers.

They're just so fluid. But 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. Very nice.

Did that come through, you think? Good foley work. 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 Cheesy Cheese, nah, I don't know if he 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. No. 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. Right, to the back of the controller, right? To the back of the controller, making the back of the controller essentially one large button. Yeah, and it's just kind of jumping up

and hitting your thumb. That was another great explanation, Chuck. Man, that's a tough one because you really got to see it in action. But you still, you did it great. Hyper tapping, the best hyper tappers can hit the button about seven times a second, which is bomb-boggling.

What about a roller? With rolling, people like Cheezy can hit it 20 times a second. What? 20 times a second. And Cheezy, 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 Salie and Christopher, or Cheesy, like, they were 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 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 two hundreds, right? 29 is where the best normal players max out. In the thirties is where, um, Joseph Sayley was maxing out.

This is like up to like 250. And there was a kid who 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. How old was he? What's his name? Give this kid his due.

He was 13 years old at the time. This was December of 2023. So about a year ago. He was in Oklahoma. His name was Willis Gibson. Blue Scooty was his player name. Yeah. Are you gonna drop the level?

I think you should. 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 a system That's how excited you are very weird. I was and everybody was going crazy over this kid except For pageant off who said yes. Well, you know you beat the 40-old version of game. Nice accomplishment. Right, yeah.

He said that Tetris itself, the pure, like, the theoretical version of the game, you could never beat it. Yeah, I get it, I guess, but come on, man. I know, I thought that too, like, it's a 13-year-old you're talking to, buddy. 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 Tetracing, 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. Yeah, again, we said it was called the Tetris effect. There was a guy named Jeffrey Goldsmith, who was a writer who was 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 Pharma-tronic, which is like an addictive drug, but in software form. Yeah.

And Pejet Nov, ever the contrarian, said like, no, it's more like an earworm. Right. Is it with this guy an earworm. Right. Right. Is it with this guy? I don't know. He likes to be right, I think. So yes, 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 deal is behind that. I know at least one writer chalked it up to what's called the Zygernik effect. That is super cool. That was coined by a psychologist in Russia, Bluma. Well, Zygernik, or I'm sorry, Zygernik.

Bluma, what a great first name. I think it's Zygernik. Okay. Well, you know me in EIs and European pronunciations. 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 Zygernik effect is that the brain really, really wants to store information about a task that

isn't complete yet. 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. 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. Pretty cool. It is activated again. Like you said, moment by moment over and over and over again. Pretty cool. It is super cool. There is another guy named Richard Heyer, or I'm sure in your pronunciation, Heyer, 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 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 while when they get really good at it Because the brains no longer being challenged like it was originally thanks to the zygernic effect. Yeah. Yeah There have been other studies. Of course. There was one that found that Tetris may reduce the strength of cravings This is in 2015 by the British and Australian psychologists Oh the British and Australian psychologists. Oh. The British and Australian. Is that a band? I thought that was the name of the, yeah. It's like a British Sea Power, one of my favorite bands.

Yeah, so just by psychologists in Britain and Australia, I think. Got it. 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. They just said yes. Yeah, that you might crave. Yeah, they're like, we're undergrads, duh. And playing Tetris for three minutes lessened the cravings. I am curious if that's just because they're preoccupied with it. They argued that it was effective because it involved, 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. Right. And one of the great things about cravings is if you can write it out or distract yourself for something like that that when you come Back from that task your brain very rarely goes right back to the craving. Yeah, 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. Right. 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 recatalogues it to something far less traumatic, thanks to your working memory being occupied while you're doing this other thing, too. We should do an episode on EMDR someday. It's just insane how effective it can be. 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, that found that playing Tetris does not improve things like spatial cognition. And you would think that's the one thing it would help with.

Yeah, I think it still helps with visio-spatial arrangement, like you said, packing a car. Oh, okay. But it doesn't, you can't see something and be like, 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, just that specific thing. I it still does help although I didn't see any studies. It's just how could it not you know, I agree Studies be damned you got anything else on Tetris. I have nothing else. I can't wait for that game boy I'll report back with pictures that Chuck the podcaster Instagram. Oh nice. I gotta put those kudzu pictures up hadn't done it

Oh, yeah, you gotta put those kudzu pictures up. Hadn't done it. Oh, yeah, you need to, man. Yeah. Um, yeah, you got to. You put it on the podcast, you gotta deliver, Chuck. I have to deliver, Josh. Uh, 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. This is a timely one because 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 okay.

I'm sure my tombstone will say Charles W. Chuck Clark Bryant. I will see to it that it does if I don't love you. Well, I'm gonna be between you and Yumi so you can constantly just be talking over me. Okay, good. That's how we should do it. You should do you me me you Emily. Okay.

And then we're not gonna talk about pets or children because that's too sad. What if we just did like a mass burial together and save some money? Oh yeah, just, or a sky burial. Throw us all up in a mountain and let the crows eat us or whatever, vultures. Yeah, but I'm sure shipping our cadavers

would be kind of expensive. That's true. All right, well we'll work this out. Anyway, Josh and Clark made a bet that in five years augmented reality glasses would be all the rage, because Josh said that he thought they would be commonplace by Halloween 2024.

Here we are, Josh. What do you think? That doesn't sound like something I'd say in retrospect. Well, Alisa says, I think Chuck won this one. It is funny though, recently someone I know saw me, 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 you didn't know No, I knew the guy those meta ray bands that you can like whatever interact online through your glasses basically what there's

Yeah, that's what you thought would be commonplace. I think you didn't chase after him and say like hey, I never said yes No, I didn't well just thought chase after him and say like, hey, I never said yes? Uh, no, I didn't. Well. Just thought I'd expose it here. There you go. Now we know. You wanna say his name and street address? I do not.

All right, well, since Chuck told an anecdote about an anonymous friend using Google Glasses and I lost a bet, then we have to sign off by thanking whoever wrote this email. Who was it again? Alisa from Brazil. 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? No money as far as I'm concerned. And if you want to be like Alisa from Brazil,

you can email us as well at stuffpodcastsatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.