Block Party!
REMAINING D-Day veterans were done proud by the commemorations on June 6, seventy years on from the game changing invasion of Normandy.
Another anniversary on the very same day passed almost without notice. This one changed the history of games. It was 30 years since the first release of Tetris.
The game was invented by Alexey Pajitnov of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and was introduced on to a Russian computer.
The following year, though, it was ported to the IBM PC, and that led to this addictive game, with its combinations of four blocks coming ever faster down the screen, becoming a worldwide sensation.It hit the big time in 1989 when it was selected as the single game to be packaged with the Nintendo Game Boy, an immediate best seller.
Since then it has moved on from platform to platform and it remains one of the most downloaded games today for phones and tablets. Just this month, a site called www.uncoverdiscover.com named Tetris as the No 1 Best Selling Video Game of All Time.
Google Play has so many variations of it that you lose count. Some claim to be 'original' or 'classic' Tetris. Others are deliberately different, like Tetris Black, which makes it harder by losing the colours allocated to the different shapes, and Tetris Run, where it is' re-imagined as an arcade game.'
What is more, playing Tetris is good for you. According to experts, playing it for just half an hour a day for three months boosts general cognitive functions such as 'critical thinking, reasoning, language and processing!
