Like many of history’s greatest ideas, Tetris (俄罗斯方块)came about quite unintentionally. Alexey Pajitnov was a software engineer at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, tasked with testing a new type of computer. To do so, he wrote a simple game based on a puzzle from his childhood. It would help assess how powerful the computer was--and provide a bit of fun. Little did he know that the resulting game would go on to become one of the greatest, most addictive and most successful of all time.
Tetris is a puzzle game in which geometric shapes fall down onto a playing field, and the player has to arrange them to form gapless lines. Pajitnov took inspiration from pentomino, a classic puzzle game consisting of all the different shapes that can be made by combining five squares--12 in total--with the goal of arranging them in a wooden box like a jigsaw puzzle.
To simplify things, he knocked that down to four squares, thus reducing the number of shapes from 12 to seven. He called the game Tetris, combining the Greek numeral “tetra”(meaning four) and tennis, his favorite sport. Pajitnov himself was immediately hooked. “I couldn’t stop myself from playing this prototype version, because it was very addictive to put the shapes together,” he said on the phone from Seattle, where he now lives.
Tetris has been the subject of several scientific studies. One found that playing the game can be effective in fighting off cravings for food and, while another noted an increase in the thickness of some parts of the brain in people who had played regularly. Playing Tetris for prolonged periods of time can lead to players dreaming about the falling pieces or interpreting real-world objects as shapes in the game and mentally re-arranging them--a phenomenon known as “the Tetris Effect”.
“With time going by, it hasn’t lost any of its play value and nothing has come to replace Tetris,” said Henk Rogers, a computer scientist, explaining the game’s enduring popularity. “It’s like Happy Birthday. There have been lots of songs that come and go, but Happy Birthday is always sung in the same way. Tetris has become the Happy Birthday of computer games.”
【小题1】Why did Alexey Pajitnov create Tetris?| A．To bring back childhood memory. |
| B．To provide more fun for the public. |
| C．To update the computer system. |
| D．To assess a new kind of computer. |
| A．Pleased | B．Determined | C．Obsessed | D．Moved |
| A．It can cause players to dream about the falling pieces. |
| B．It can stimulate people’s appetite for food. |
| C．It can lead to “the Tetris Effect” instantly. |
| D．It can increase the overall thickness of the brain. |
| A．To describe the concept of Tetris. |
| B．To indicate the popularity of Tetris. |
| C．To provide the example of popular songs. |
| D．To introduce the topic of Happy Birthday. |
