Hello and welcome to the Anthropocene Reviewed, a podcast where we review different facets

of the Human-Centered Planet on a 5-star scale.

My name's John Green, and today I'll be reviewing the video game Tetris and the seed potatoes

of Lennon Grad.

Let's start with Tetris.

In June of 1984, the computer programmer Alexei Pizzytnov was working for the Soviet

Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

He was 28 years old and a bit of a puzzle nerd.

To test the capabilities the computers he worked on, Pizzytnov liked to create simple

games, and that month he developed a game in which the player had to fit various kinds

of tetromanos together, a tetromano being a shape composed of four connected squares.

Tetromanos come in seven possible configurations, and Tetris has all of them.

Your job is to fit them together in a way that forms horizontal lines that can then disappear.

Tetris, named for Tetromanos and Pizzytnov's favorite sport, tennis, would go on to infect

the thoughts and dreams of millions of people, and also lead to a complex series of lawsuits

over who owns intellectual property created by an employee of a totalitarian state that

no longer exists.

When Tetris came to the United States in 1989, the game's tagline was, from Russia with

fun.

The Berlin Wall fell that year.

The Cold War was ending.

The promise of freedom and democracy was toppling dictatorships throughout Eastern Europe,

...