Summary
In 1984 Tetris, one of the most popular computer games ever, was invented in Moscow. Chloe Hadjimatheou speaks to its creator, Alexey Pajitnov, and to Henk Rogers, an American businessman who helped bring Tetris to the world. This programme was first broadcast in 2011.
PHOTO: Tetris being played on a mobile phone (Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.7 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.5 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices. |
| 0:18.0 | What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
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| 0:35.4 | Sounds. |
| 0:36.4 | Hello and thank you for downloading the podcast of Witness History from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:48.0 | This week we're taking a festive look at the history of Toys and Games. |
| 0:52.0 | Today we're going back to 1984 when a Russian scientist |
| 0:56.2 | invented the classic early computer game Tetris. Chloe Hadjamathio reports. For more than 25 years, people have been battling to make those colored blocks falling down the computer screen |
| 1:14.7 | fit together to make rows. It all started in the early 1980s. A young researcher at |
| 1:20.9 | Moscow's Academy of Science, Alexi Pichitnov isn't being challenged by his job in the Cybernetics |
| 1:27.0 | department, so he begins using his skills in other ways. |
| 1:31.4 | My work was very technical and actually I got a little bit bored that time. |
| 1:38.2 | And for all my life I like all kind of mathematical puzzles, readles, as soon as I have some |
| 1:46.6 | computer in my possession I start to entertain myself write my own puzzles and games as well and that was just one of them. |
| 1:56.2 | My inspiration was the board puzzle game called Pentomino. |
| 2:02.2 | It's a small box with the 12 different shape made out of 5 squares. |
| 2:10.1 | You take it from the box and those are very interesting, very different shape and you try to play with them like you play with jigs or puzzle pieces. |
| 2:19.0 | But the real challenge is to put them back in the box and you could spend a good couple hours trying |
| 2:27.0 | doing it. And when I start programming this virtual board game, the Tet is idea kind of sparkled. How did it take off? Well at that time |
... |
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