Tag Archives: tetris

This Actually Playable LEGO Tetris Set Celebrates the Digital Game’s 40th Anniversary

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Not only does this LEGO set let you slide bricks into place, it comes with a randomized brick generator, and even a scoreboard to capture your score!

A perfect tribute to one of the world’s most influential digital games (with perhaps the most riveting backstory of any game ever), this LEGO Ideas set comes from the mind of LEGO Builder ‘victorvey300’ who wanted to pay a hat-tip to Tetris on its 40th anniversary which first made its appearance in Russian game circles back in the early 80s, finally finding its way to Nintendo’s first Game Boy in 1985. The LEGO set comes in the form of a box with a lid that doubles as the game’s screen. Bricks sit in a container below, controls can be found on the bottom right, and the top right acts as a leaderboard. When all’s done, the box closes shut, ensuring that bricks don’t get lost.

Designer: victorvey300

Not to spoil the AppleTV+ movie for you, but the Tetris game has one of the most nail-biting backstories of all time. Developed by Alexey Pajitnov, a resident of the Soviet Republic in the 80s, Tetris was circulated heavily within the USSR on bootlegged floppy disks and finally made its way to an American sales representative for a gaming company. What ensued was literally Cold War espionage at its best. Henk Rogers, the American rep who discovered Tetris tried to buy the rights to the game on behalf of Nintendo, which was working on the first Game Boy handheld console. Tetris was to be a part of this revolutionary portable gaming device, but the Soviets weren’t ready to sell Tetris to any outsider without putting up a fight (all hardware and software sales outside the Union were controlled/authorized by a government agency). In the end, Pajitnov managed to escape Russia and also ended up selling the rights to Tetris, which featured on the first Game Boy, becoming the global sensation it is today. As a tribute to this story and to Alexey himself, the LEGO Ideas kit also comes with a minifigure of Pajitnov standing beside an old-school computer!

The beauty of this LEGO build lies in just how much attention to detail it has. The vault-shaped kit has Tetris graphics on the outside (with branding), and the inside is simply filled with features and details that allow as many as 6 players to actually play a full game of Tetris, complete with brick generators that tell you what the next brick should be.

Playing the game is delightfully simple. Bricks sit in a bin at the bottom, the playable area or the matrix grid is right in front with vertical channels to slide bricks down, and a treadmill-shaped panel on the bottom right lets you scroll to see what your next brick should be. Scroll with your right hand, find the corresponding brick with your left and drop it down the channel of your choice. It slides down instantly, landing in place just the way it would in a game. The only real difference is that you need to choose each brick’s orientation and position before you drop it into the channel. Pieces don’t rotate or move once they’ve been slid in.

A game of digital Tetris can go on for HOURS because every time you complete a row, it disappears, helping clear out a part of the screen for more gameplay. That feature doesn’t exist in this LEGO version, which makes for a fairly shorter game… but calculating scores is much easier, allowing you to correspond the uppermost complete row to the line on the scoreboard right beside it. You can, however, reset the entire game in a flash by hitting the red Reset button on the left side of the matrix grid and have all the bricks drop down into the bin below. The alternative would be to manually lift each brick out of the lid, which sounds a little too problematic…

The Tetris bricks are referred to as tetrominoes, and come in 7 shapes that correspond with letters of the alphabet (I, O, T, J, L, S, and Z). The bricks are color-coded to make things easier to understand (after all, we recognize colors MUCH faster than we do shapes) for all people, and the game allows as many as 6 players, with colorful studs that you can press into the scoreboard to mark your highest scores.

This LEGO kit comes from the mind of independent builder victorvey300, who put his passion for LEGO and his love for Tetris together to create this incredibly comprehensive MOC (my own creation). Victor’s submission is a part of LEGO’s Ideas forum, a community-driven site where passionate LEGO creators build their own structures and users vote for their favorite ones. With over 5000 votes, this LEGO Tetris set is cruising comfortably to hit the 10,000 vote mark, which is then followed by LEGO’s own internal team reviewing the submission before turning it into a retail set. If you want, you can vote for the LEGO Ideas Tetris set too simply by visiting the LEGO Ideas website here.

The post This Actually Playable LEGO Tetris Set Celebrates the Digital Game’s 40th Anniversary first appeared on Yanko Design.

7-Eleven and Tetris collab results in this super cool Slurpee handheld gaming device

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Alex T has lately broken every record possible for the Tetris game and the cult classic is again in the trends. Perhaps the perfect time for the Slurpee Handheld Gaming Device to make an appearance. This limited-edition merchandise from convenience store 7-Eleven is designed in collaboration with Tetris. Along with this, the duo has created other products too for gamers who love retro stuff.

Limited to just 20,000 units, the unique handheld device has the shape of a Slurpee that’ll always entice you to game more and drink even more. Released almost four decades from now, the iconic arcade game has seen generations of fun and bonding that makes it a common name among gamers. There have been thousands of knockoff versions and variants, but still the original Tetris has stood the test of time.

Designer: 7-Eleven and Tetris

According to CEO of Tetris, Maya Rogers, “As we mark the milestone 40th anniversary of Tetris, we are excited to announce our partnership with 7-Eleven, another iconic brand beloved across generations,” she added, “this collaboration celebrates our spirit of innovation and delivers fans with a new, fun way to experience Tetris.”

The game is played on the front of the Slurpee cup-shaped handheld that looks like 7-Eleven’s iconic cup. There’s a small full-color display (smaller than the original Game Boy) measuring 1.8 inches on which you can play the nostalgic game. The device draws power from the three AAA batteries and if you want, you can also plug it into a laptop or power outlet with a USB-C cable connection. To elevate the gameplay immersion, it also has built-in speakers.

There is no release date for the Slurpee Handheld Gaming Device yet, but we should expect the announcement soon. As we said, the collection comes with other goodies as well including shirts, tote bags, two cap designs, stickers and more. What we are interested in is this cool gadget that you can carry around on the beach and then settle down to play a stint of your favorite classic game.

 

The post 7-Eleven and Tetris collab results in this super cool Slurpee handheld gaming device first appeared on Yanko Design.

This playable Tetris LEGO set will have you brain exercising for hours on end

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The nostalgic play of the Tetris game has got generations of love and for good reason. 15-year-old Willis Gibson finally managed to beat Tetris by reaching level 157 of the classic video game and setting the internet on fire. Now that Willis has got this challenge under his belt, a LEGO enthusiast has got a real-world Tetris set game to engage in.

This is a LEGO Ideas submission by designer victorvey300 that’s insanely clever and seems like total fun to kill some free time. The real-life Tetris game incorporates the gameplay and elements of the video game ingeniously and challenges even the most seasoned Tetris fans to get a high score.

Designer: victorvey300

Called the Tetris Solid, this LEGO set has got my solid vote for being the next big LEGO Ideas project that should hit the shelves ASAP. The small case with the LEGO bricks opens up to reveal the vertical lanes where you slide the tetrominoes in the desired orientation. A rollable treadmill on the right shows the next brick to slide, and you have to think fast on your heels where the brick should go. You can even keep a score of how well you are playing which is ingenious.

Pretty obviously, you cannot make the lines disappear when a horizontal gap is filled (it’s real life not a video game graphic, remember). That’s why the maker took the liberty to tweak the rules a bit, wherein you have to fill the board complexly with all the pieces, just like a puzzle game. A Tetris spin-off for sure but still has the classic influence for the most part which is impressive.

You win if you manage to add all the pieces to the board without any gaps being left. Of course, it’ll take a lot of tries before you get the hang of it but if you do fail, there is a reset button in the form of a lever that lets all the pieces drop back into the box to start fresh. To commemorate Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris, the box has a hidden compartment that reveals the geniuses’ diorama complete with a PC depicting the time when he created the game.

That said, the current 4,000-odd supporters for the Tetris Solid is quite low considering how cool this idea actually is. Let’s hope this LEGO idea reaches more enthusiasts who’ll eventually push it into becoming an official LEGO set someday.

The post This playable Tetris LEGO set will have you brain exercising for hours on end first appeared on Yanko Design.

13-Year Old Becomes First Human To Beat Tetris On NES

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13-year-old gaming streamer Blue Scuti has become the first human to beat the classic Tetris game on the Nintendo Entertainment System, almost 35 years after its release. Previously, the game had only been beaten by artificial intelligence. Blue achieved the feat during a semi-final round of the Classic Tetris World Championship (CTWC) and set three world records in the process: the highest overall score (6,850,560), the highest level achieved (Level 157), and the most total number of lines (1,511). Wow!

The game is “beat” when it crashes, and the screen freezes. For the first two decades of the game’s existence, it was believed that progress past level 29 was impossible because the pieces are falling so fast that holding left or right will not move a piece all the way to one side or the other before it reaches the bottom. That led gamers to start getting creative with how they used their controllers.

According to Polygon, Blue’s strategy “was a culmination of the technique that younger players have been developing in recent years. These newer strategies, like ‘hypertapping’ and later ‘rolling,’ emerged in 2016 and 2020 respectively, allowing players to operate the NES controller even faster than the buttons by tapping the underside of the controller.” I’ve seen players doing that in videos and wondered what was happening! That explains it. Me? I’m lucky to hit the right button at all, let alone at lightning speed.

[via BoingBoing and Polygon]