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Tetris turns 40 years old

In addition to international tournaments, regular Tetris competitions are held all over the world

MOSCOW, June 6. /TASS/. Tetris turned 40 years old on Thursday, with its official birthday celebrated every year on June 6.

Tetris was developed in 1984 by Soviet programmer Alexey Pazhitnov on an Electronika 60 computer. The game became world famous after Nintendo Corporation began selling the game for its Game Boy console. To this day, Tetris is still played by millions of people on handheld game consoles, online on the Internet and on smartphones. In 2007, the puzzle game was included in the US Library of Congress as one of the ten most influential computer games of all time. In addition to international tournaments, regular Tetris competitions are held all over the world. The Russian Computer Sports Federation organizes such events in Russia.

This January, The New York Times reported that an American teenager from Oklahoma, Willis Gibson, is believed to be the first in history to fully complete the original version of the Tetris game. According to the newspaper, the 13-year-old boy has reached the last, 157th, level of the game on a Nintendo gaming console, reaching the point at which the game "hangs" at a score of 999999 due to software limitations. Previously, only artificial intelligence has been able to reach the point where the game "freezes."

Andrey Kosenko was the first Russian winner of the international classic Tetris championship. In September 2023, in the finals of CTM Futures August 2023, the Russian beat out his American opponent, nicknamed LeCaptain. The young man admitted to TASS that he started playing Tetris at the age of five and devotes an hour or two a day on average to this activity. The agency source said that now he plays for himself more and enjoys the game. "But I would still like to win in the 1st division - I won in the 2nd and 3rd only," he admitted.

"By the way, I am no longer the only Russian winner. Another kid won in the winter, but in a rather low division, the 4th one," he added.

He noted a new control technique - the so-called Rolling - among the latest innovations. "It's a regular gamepad that the top players now hold unusually. The buttons are on top, and from below I hit the back cover with each finger so that the button on top is pressed. This way you get to move the pieces very quickly, which gives you the ability to play at top speed. If you just press the button, as people usually do, the speed of moving the pieces is low, and it is difficult to play even at the penultimate speed," the player explained.

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