- I am Alexey. I am creator of the game of "Tetris", so you could call me Mr Tetris.

- And I'm Hank Rogers. I'm the business guy behind "Tetris", so you can call me Dr Tetris, 'cause I kept Tetris alive for all these years. Today, we're going to be answering questions that were posted on forums and other sites. [upbeat electronic theme music] First question is, "What was the first version of 'Tetris' like? Wasn't it called "Pentominoes"?"

- That was the board puzzle which inspired me to think about Tetris. Basically, it's a set of the different shapes made out of five squares, and there are exactly 12 of them.

- This is a tetromino, and this is a pentomino. Tetromino has four blocks, and a pentomino has five blocks.

- So I downsized five square to four squares. And we have much less pieces there, just seven pieces instead of 12.

- If you had a play field 13 columns wide, then you could just stack each piece on itself and you would never have a dilemma. It would be easy. So by squeezing the number of columns that you have to work with, from 13 down to 10, you have to really think about where am I gonna put this? And I think that's the kind of a pleasure center, if you will. "Tetris" actually makes you have serious decisions in real time. So here's the next "Tetris" question. "I just realized that the move that wipes out four lines is called tetris. Well, what is the origin of the name?"

- Four is tetra in Greece. I used to love tennis, and I still love this game, So I take this termination, "-is". That's how I came up with the name "Tetris".

- I decided to call them single, double, triple "Tetris", like single, double, triple home run.

- And quadruple is really a long, ugly word. And tetris is much better.

- So the question is, "What programming language was used to make the first "Tetris"? On Wikipedia, it just says it was made on an Electronika 60. And while we're on that, what programming languages were used in the Soviet Union?"

- Practically all the programming language were available at that time in Soviet Union. "Tetris" was written on the Pascal version for operating system RT-11, which I had on my Electronika 60 computer. That version was very successfully ported on PC for Turbo Pascal.

- One thing that you have to understand about those days is that there was a set of rules and regulation called CoCom that were meant to prevent high technology from going to the Soviet Union at that time. So they couldn't get the fastest chips.

- All we have is so-called monitors, which produce only ASCII symbols. It was 45 lines. Each line has 80 ASCII symbols in it. So in order to design the square, I used square brackets. Eight of them create one pieces.

- So in Japan, when we published, we made "Tetris" in C for the personal computers, and there were eight different kinds of personal computers. And for the Nintendo, it was a 6502 Assembler. So the question is, "How did "Tetris" make the best song in gaming ever years back, and has never been overthrown?"

- That's not a question for me. My version of "Tetris" didn't have any graphics or sound on it.

- So in 1988, when I first published "Tetris" in Japan, I had no communication with Alexey, or anybody on that side. And I knew that somehow that Alexey didn't want "Tetris" to be associated with the Cold War side of Russia at the time, or Soviet Union at the time. And so I looked back in the history of Russia and found some folk songs.

- There are hundreds of version of "Tetris", and each one of them have slightly different set of melodies available. But the most popular are folk songs called Korobeiniki, and [speaking in Russian] which is not exactly folk song. They include the Tchaikovsky piece from "Nutcracker" into the Game Boy version. That's my embarrassment, when during Tchaikovsky performance, small kids start crying, "Tetris, Tetris!" [Hank laughing]

- I have heard some club remixes of the "Tetris" music, and I think that's a nice homage. "Tetris" has become part of popular culture around the world, and I think that's a good thing. The question is, "When you beat the Game Boy version, Russian dancers come out and a space shuttle takes off. What does that ending mean?" In the "Tetris" that I made for Nintendo, which predates the Game Boy version, so it's a family computer, or the NES version, [Announcer speaking in Japanese] we had Russian cossack dancers, and, you know, the idea was to have more excitement as you achieved more and more and more. And yet we are stuck with 64K, or tiny little memory. I didn't have anything to do with the space shuttle and the rockets. They never asked me. Nintendo just did it.

- I saw the shuttle in my screen just once.

- I guess I played more "Tetris" than he did, so I could make the the rocket come out plenty of times.

- But I used to be the world champion in this game when nobody else--

- So a couple of weeks when nobody else had seen the game, when he was the world champion. [both laughing] "I wonder who designs the software that decides what "Tetris" piece to give you next." What was your random number generator? What did you use?

- Well, I used the standard one. I had some problem with random generator, because it starts always with the same number. So I need to put some kind of another randomness to start this random generator.

- I have an interesting little story about that. Nintendo is going to master Game Boy "Tetris". I got the version and I played it, and I said, "The pieces are not random. One of the pieces feels like it's coming out more than the others." So I got my QA people to count the pieces, and sure enough, one of them was, I don't know, 40% more than the the others. And I told Nintendo, "This is not acceptable." They sent their programmer to my office in Yokohama, and we worked together fixing the random number generator. Basically, we add one the first time, then we add two, then we add three, then we add four, then seven, then we go back to add one, two, three, four. And so we spread that spike across all the pieces, and then it became random. Today, we basically created something called the bag system. And the way the bag system works is you take the seven tetrominoes and you put 'em in a bag, shuffle, and then play them out. Then you put 'em all back in the bag, and then you play them out again. So what that means is if the I piece comes out of the first bag and the last out of the second bag, 13 pieces later, you're guaranteed to get another I piece. And so that guarantee means you always know that at a certain point, the I piece is going to come out. Yeah, I kinda felt that the game lost something there, that fun part where everybody's watching you surviving at the top, and then the I piece comes out, and it's a big, "Yeah!" But if you already know that the I piece is going to come up then it kind of takes away from that excitement, I guess.

- It provides a little bit more of strategic kind of spirit to the game, because you could build your profile in your mind before you actually do it. That's the strategy of the game.

- I have an interesting little story about that. Checking into hotel, and I said, "I have something to do with "Tetris"." And the guy goes, "Oh, why does it never give me the I piece when I need it?" And I said, "It's completely random." "No, it's watching me, the way I play, and it doesn't give it to me when I need it." I said, "No, it's just random." He said, "No, I'm sure it's watching me." People attribute intelligence to randomness. So the question is, "How many lines of code would "Tetris" be?" And my answer is one, if it's APL. [both laughing]

- That's very true, probably. My original quote for "Tetris" contains somewhere between seven and 800 lines.

- How long did it take you to code "Tetris"?

- I start with the very basic procedure to manipulate with the piece. And those procedure was done really quickly, maybe in two, three days, and I have something breathing on my screen, breathing.

- Breathing.

- Breathing on my screen. Yes, the game design ideas start to come to me. They take maybe another couple weeks for me to program. Well, I was busy with some other jobs that time, so that was my spare time spent. I had a very simple prototype, just very basic matrix, and the pieces appearing. No level structure at all. And frankly, I can't stop playing this ugly, very early version. I can't stop myself playing it. That was the point I realized that gonna be a very good game. Rotation was very inspirational procedure. You push the button and it just turns. Push the button, turns.

- The question is, "Do "Tetris" pieces have official names? I call 'em line, square, T, L, and the fucking weird one."

- Yes! [chuckling]

- I call all of them the fucking weird ones. But anyway, no, they all have just letters that we've associated with them, L and J, the T, S and Z, the I and the O.

- Everybody admire the four by one piece. Some professional even call them angel and put small wings around it. My favorite piece is J, like that.

- This is my favorite piece. It can go this way, or it can go this way. So the problem with these is they only fit in it one way. You can take this piece down here, and because of the way that the computer works, it can go from this state to this state. It's called a T-pin. Somebody from Nintendo showed it to me once, and he was so proud that he did it.

- But it was embedded in the original version.

- Yeah, the T spin was always possible, and you called it an artifact. It was just not recognized. When we started to recognize it, we started giving points for it. "I wonder if the creators of "Tetris" get the Tetris Effect." The answer is absolutely.

- I still see falling blocks in my dreams.

- I still, when I walk around in the street and I see patterns in buildings or in furniture, or whatever it is, I see "Tetris" blocks all the time.

- Me too. And I rather love this effect. It doesn't scare me. I'm in love with it.

- The question is "The tuck, sliding in a piece after it lands feature, is it a bug? Is it a function?

- That was in original version, by the way. It was the opportunity to make one or two last moves after the piece touch the profile.

- "Tetris" had licensees that had no control, meaning there was no central authority saying, "This is the way it should work." In the Game Boy, in the Nintendo version, you have to make all your decisions about what you do with the pieces when the piece is falling, because as soon as it touches, it locks down. But in the Sega version, you could drop this thing, boom, hard drop, and then you can still rotate it afterwards and you can still move it. You have, what is it, half-a-second I think, from the time that it touches. And so when Alexey and I took over "Tetris" in 1996, we fixed it so that both Game Boy players and Sega players could play, which is, I think, a pretty good accomplishment. That was not easy to do, because they're so different. Question is, "What was your biggest disagreement related to "Tetris"?"

- My feeling was the rotational system. When we work out the standard, I desperately want it to be kept as simple as possible, but the pressure to protect the player's right to have their favorite version.

- So what he's talking about is if the pieces on the side of the play field, if you're on one side, this is an allowable rotation, but if you're on the other side, you have to move it before you can rotate it. And I felt that was weird. Why should it be able to do something on one side and not on the other side? The way, super rotations is what we called it, is the first rotation is visual rotation. So that's the same as Game Boy. It actually looks like it's rotating.

- And that's what I love.

- That's what he loves, and it's fine But on the Sega side, they don't care, because they're never rotating it while it's up there. They're rotating it once it's landed. Their problem is if every piece can rotate, then this piece should be able to rotate as well. And in Game Boy, once it's on its back, there's no way to rotate it anymore. Even though you might slide it back and forth if you gave it a 0.5 sec, but you'd never be able to do this. In order to make it work for all possible rotations, we ended up having to have five alternatives, the basic rotation, and then four others. Yeah, I actually worked on this myself, and it was hard. And at the end of that, people were pissed off with me, because they liked their rotation and other people's rotation. "Why are you changing the game? Da da da." So yeah, that was a big disagreement. "Which version of "Tetris" is the definitive version? And if they didn't choose the Game Boy or NES version, how can they be so wrong?" [laughing] You could say Game Boy was huge. Of course, "Tetris" made Game Boy, and Game Boy made "Tetris". But if you go into the future, I as a publisher sold way more a mobile phone, and that's just because everybody has one with them all the time, and they have disposable time. I would say the definitive version of "Tetris" is the one Alexey created on the Electronika 60.

- [Alexey] Or maybe ported to PC. I like that version the most, frankly. The version we have on regular browser is very close to it, with the very pleasant adding in it.

- The first time I brought him a Nintendo version, he turned the joy pad upside down so that he could play with his right hand. I was like, "Oh my God, I didn't realize this was such a difficult thing." Keyboard, your right hand is on the number key, and your left is where you do your rotate. And now, all of a sudden, it's backwards. Are we better at moving things around with our left thumb or our right finger? And this is a psychological question which I don't have an answer to. So the question is, "Which "Tetris" strategy is yours? Line up cascades, keep the stack low, or line up for four-line "Tetris" all the time?" I'm a classy player, so I'm always lining 'em up for the four-line "Tetris". That's just how I play. Normally, I keep it on the right side, the empty column, but it can be on the left side, it could be in the middle. It adds a little bit more difficulty if you put it in the middle, because you don't have as many choices about how to put the other pieces.

- My son, by the way, is absolutely T spin player, and he did great. I had a time when I tried to to switch myself to the cascade version. I got some success in it. I was able to make at least five, six step of cascade, which is which is pretty substantial. If I play for my own pleasure, I still do it for line strategy.

- When we came up with the T spin, we made it it slightly more valuable than the I piece. And the reason for that is because if we didn't, people would just continue playing for the I piece. So by making the T spin a little bit more valuable, we wanted to create a set of players that were playing T spin. Once the balance between T spin player and I players, or players that go back and forth, once we achieve that balance, we would adjust the amount of points you get between a T spin and the I. "When you play a modern version of "Tetris", d'you reserve pieces, or do you play old school and use what you're given?" If I'm trying to go for a super high score, yeah, I'll store the I piece. You could say that it's a crutch, but it's something that I use to look ahead.

- Hold feature is very beneficial because we emphasize the the T spin. That doesn't change mechanics of the game, but it adds some kind of special spicy flavor to the game as well.

- Question is, "I'm interested in the story of the creators of "Tetris". Where are they now, what has "Tetris" brought to them personally, and have they been respected by the industry since?"

- Since the "Tetris" success, I decide to become game designer. And I had my career of game designer since. I live in the United States. And the industry have a very good appreciation of me.

- Since I found "Tetris", I started a mobile phone game company. I sold it for a bunch of money. Had a heart attack, found my missions in life. First mission is to end the use of carbon-based fuel. I'm also working on going to space, so I'm also working on building a moon base on the moon. Yeah, I'm pretty busy these days. We have a new success, which is the movie. It's a movie called "TETRIS", coming out on Apple TV+, starring Taron Egerton as playing yours truly. What do you think about the movie, Alexey?

- We were at the Premier on the movie festival in Austin. The movie was met very well by the audience.

- People rally love this game, and love the story. The question is, "What role, if any, did "Tetris" play an ending the Cold War?" I don't know if "Tetris" actually had something to do with ending the Cold War, but it just so happened to be happening at the same time, so who knows? "Tetris" went a long way in giving people the understanding that people behind the Iron Curtain and people not behind the Iron Curtain are just people, at the end of the day, and we're driven by the same things. We play the same games, and all of this politics doesn't come close to things like friendship. I wanna thank all of you for listening and spending time with us at Ars Technica.

- Thank you very much. It was very great pleasure to talk about my baby, my game. And play "Tetris"! [Hank chuckling] [electronic theme tune for "Tetris"]