Tetris

Tetris is a puzzle video game created by the Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov in the mid-1980s in his spare time while working at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Falling pieces called tetrominoes, each made of four connected blocks, descend a rectangular playing field, and the player rotates and shifts them to complete and clear horizontal lines before the stack reaches the top. It is the best-selling video game of all time, having sold more than 520 million copies as of December 2024, and the most ported, appearing in some 220 official versions across at least 70 platforms; its Game Boy release alone sold about 35 million copies and became a defining reason players bought Nintendo's handheld console. It is frequently named among the greatest and most influential video games ever made and was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2015.