Gaming

Except for Willis.

A shitload of early games only method of defeating the player was simply to be come more difficult or faster until the player ran out of lives, especially during the early years of video games in the ‘70s and ‘80s. This is not a feature unique to Tetris at all.

The only real difference is Tetris’ longevity, which has far outlasted the Soviet Union it originated from.

Not true. A few months ago, a kid played Tetris until it crashed. Technically beating the game.

You can finish the game by hitting a memory overflow bug very far in the game under specific conditions. Just look up finishing Tetris...

Everybody talking about Scooty "beating" the game but nobody is talking about the story. There is a story. You are building a missile silo with bricks. The lines aren't disappearing, the camera is scrolling up. It was the Cold War. It makes sense.

I have no official documentation of this.

A lot of people talking about the arcade component, but Tetris was the original shareware. It was a phenomena that spread through the USSR until it touched a British entrepreneur. It didn't even keep score originally.

It does have an ending tho. And until recently, when a 13 year old kid managed to do it, the end of the game was only achieved by machines/AI. Tho, to be fair, the ending is basically just going so far that the game stops working.

I am the man that arranges the blocks

That decend upon me from up. Above.

They come down and I spin them around

Till they fit in the ground like hand. In. Glove.

Weren't high score games a staple of arcades long before tetris?

This is just inherent to the history of games stemming from arcades. If you "finished" the game you had to insert more coins again, basically every game was structured so that if you "won" you kept playing until you finally lost, setting a high score.

False. I’ve won, you just need to be good enough to become a Tetris Master. Keep practicing! ;)

Many great games are like this. Dwarf Fortress is my personal favorite, where losing is fun.

Basically any rogue like game.

I was with them until the last sentence, like what a weird takeaway.

That's a very old-school gaming style. Every game I played on my Atari 2600 was like that. You never win, you just play until you lose. I used to wonder about the possible mass side effects of this - were we subtly conditioning people to accept being losers?

TIL Tetris is from USSR. Aswell as that the pieces in it are called tetrominos.

Tetris is like a drug.

The original roguelike

But you get really good at packing stuff so the skill translates to real life.

Welcome to every arcade game of the era