Tetris' Russian roots were evident from the game's title screen and its traditional Russian music.

Up for Grabs

Designed by Alexei Pajitnov, a programmer at the Moscow Academy of Science, Tetris certainly wasn't expected to have the sort of universal appeal it went on to achieve. In fact, in the years following the game's invention, Tetris became the object of numerous licensing battles and legal disputes as various corporations fought tooth and nail to claim the concept as their own. One of the first versions was published for IBM-compatible computers by Spectrum Holobyte. In 1988, Tetris also became very popular in arcades, thanks to Atari, which published a version that featured two-player simultaneous play.

In 1988, Tengen released a great version of Tetris for the Nintendo Entertainment System, but it was shortly pulled from the shelves when Nintendo sued the company for breach of copyright. Nintendo replaced that version of Tetris with its own, which actually lacked the Tengen version's two-player mode, as well as its excellent music. In '89, Nintendo went on to bundle in a portable version of Tetris with its then-new Game Boy system, which went on to become the best-selling game system of all time, thanks in no small part to Tetris.

Now you can play Tetris on anything from your Xbox to your calculator. There's a great, freely available online-multiplayer-enabled version for the PC available at Tetrinet2.com.

The arcade version of Tetris was one of the first and remains one of the best.

Tetris is indisputably one of the greatest games of all time. However, there's a strong case to be made for calling it not just "one of," but the single all-time greatest game of them all. Put it this way: What other video game or computer game of this era will people still be playing regularly, say, 100 years from now?

Not a one. Not besides Tetris. This is a game that's a timeless classic and yet is inherently electronic, and therefore modern--unlike the game of chess, for example, you can't play Tetris in any physical form. It's true that Tetris has undergone numerous transformations and alterations in its countless incarnations over the years, but the core game remains the same. And that core game encompasses the unique sort of addictive, hands-on challenge that only this medium can provide.

Tetris actually dates back to the mid-'80s, though its popularity didn't start to surge until some years later. The concept of the game is perfectly simple and by now second nature: You're trying to form solid rows out of pieces of various shapes that fall from the top of the screen in random order. You can't win Tetris--the action just speeds up more and more the longer you last, and the addictive appeal lies in trying to survive the onslaught of falling pieces for longer than you could the last time around. Yet the world-famous gameplay of Tetris was intuitive even when the game was completely new. Something about the falling puzzle pieces and their shapes implored even first-time players to naturally try to line them up and arrange them properly, as if Tetris appeals to some innate sensibility even the most disorganized of us have to put things in order.

This definitive and influential puzzle game went on to inspire an entire genre. In particular, a number of great puzzle games have come out of Japan over the years, all of them featuring their own unique twists on the Tetris formula. Nevertheless, as different as these games may seem, their underlying similarity to Tetris is irrefutable.

Tetris also deservers recognition for being one of the only games ever released to truly appeal to a broad demographic. Most anyone can relate a story about how some relative or other acquaintance of theirs with absolutely no other interest in gaming nevertheless became incredibly addicted to Tetris. Who's to say how many millions of hours have been spent on this game to date, perhaps when they should have been spent engaged in more productive endeavors? A cynic, or maybe an office manager, might argue that Tetris is responsible for more wasted time than anything else from the last 20 years. As for us, we're more than happy to name it one of GameSpot's Greatest Games of All Time.

As a burgeoning grade-school math nerd with a penchant for logic puzzles, I took to Tetris like a fish to water. The game's faux-educational nature kept my parents from hassling me too much during lengthy Tetris jags, which helped turn those jags into full-fledged daylong marathons. I know there's no single Game Boy game I've spent more time with than Tetris, and it may even be my most-played video game, period. I've gone through many puzzle games since then, but at best these games have just aped the elegance and urgency of Tetris. For me, video games are to Tetris like board games are to chess.