Tetris (1984)

Tetris is a tile-matching puzzle video game, originally designed and programmed by Soviet game designer Alexey Pajitnov. It released in 1984 for the Russian Electronika 60 computer, and later on many platforms.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) A great gameplay mechanic where creating full rows of blocks will give you score and remove these rows of blocks. Destroying four rows at once will create a "Tetris" causing you to get lots of points.
 * 2) You get to choose your speed for gameplay.
 * 3) The game has been ported to lots of platforms.
 * 4) Some versions of the game allow you to play two players.
 * 5) Has one of the most memorable theme songs of all time in gaming history, which was actually a traditional Russian song known as Korobushka.
 * 6) Due to how the tetriminos speed up gradually as you gain more points, Tetris is often regarded as the example of the perfect difficulty curve.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The original NES version has a level 29 kill screen since the blocks drop too fast to reach the extreme left and right sides of the screen.
 * 2) Because of how easy it is to program, a lot of Tetris clones were released on PC and mobile, and most of them are just reskins.
 * 3) *For mobile, the legitimate version of the game is made by EA, but is now delisted.

Trivia

 * Because of the Soviet communist regime, Pajitnov didn't earn royalties from the game until 1996.
 * Until the introduction of the Pokémon series in 1996, the Game Boy version of Tetris was considered the handheld's killer app for many years, helped by the fact it was the pack-in title for early systems.
 * The name is a mix of Tetra (four in Greek), and Tennis, which is Alexey's favorite sport.