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The 25th anniversary of the famous Tetris game will be celebrated in a ceremony on June the 2nd in Los Angeles. The author of the unique game, Russian developer Aleksej Pazhitnov, will visit the celebration himself. According to him the June 1984, as he at age of 29 first got the idea of creating a program for “Tetris”, was “just moments ago”. “I was strongly attracted by different puzzles. It was a sort of distraction from my main work”, said Pazhinov.

In the middle of 80’s Aleksej Pazhitnov, an employee at the Computing Center of the Science Academy of the USSR, decided to write a program for the minicomputers, that would represent a puzzle game.

He expected the new game to be an improvement of a classical game he liked very much, called Pentomino Puzzle. In that game, one had to compose 12 different types of figures, each consisting of 5 small squares, to a pre-defined large figure.

The first version of the new game was a program, that would rotate the displayed figures by 90 degrees around their center.
But at the time the computing resources available in the USSR and worldwide were not enough to run such a program. So Pazhitnov decided to simplify the game by removing one of the squares from each figure, making it four. This change also influenced the name of the game - “Tetris” derives from the Greek “tetra”, meaning “four”.

After the release of “Tetris”, many leading software and game developer companies of that time - Spectrum Holobyte and Mirrorsoft, Bullet-Proof Software and Atari Games, Famicom and his American partner Nintendo Entertainment System - started a long battle for rights to release all variations and console versions of the new game.

In 1988 with support from Hank Rodgers (president of Bullet-Proof Software) Pazhitnov founded a company for game development AnimaTek, and in 1991 Tetris company was founded. In five years Pazhitnov went over to Microsoft, where he worked on the famous puzzle series Pandora’s Box. And later, in 2005, he joined WildSnake software, where he had to start developing a new series of games for PCs and gaming consoles. In March 2007 Pazhitnov was awarded the Game Developers Choice Awards First Penguin Award.

Nowadays Pazhitnov lives in Moscow and Seattle.

P.S. The classic Tetris can be downloaded here, for example.

via habrahabr.ru

Things you come across in code. Trust me, this happens more than you expect it to…

// Magic. Do not touch.

//When I wrote this, only God and I understood what I was doing
//Now, God only knows

/* This is O(scary), but seems quick enough in practice. */
Followed by four nested for-loops.

doRun.run(); // ... "a doo run run".

/* You are not meant to understand this */

// Replaces with spaces the braces
// in cases where braces in places cause stasis
$str = str_replace(array("\{","\}")," ",$str);

options.BatchSize = 300; //Madness? THIS IS SPARTA!

last = first; /* Biblical reference */

double penetration; // ouch

via stackoverflow.com

At the end of my first semester as a computer science student, we had a project to complete. The project was a game we had to implement in Java. Sokoban is widely known and has many implementations in different languages, and this is what we managed to come up with - we even made it to the course’s “Hall of Fame”.

download: Sokoban (3.86MB) added: 31/05/2009 clicks: 20