Tetris

Tetris is a video game originally designed and programmed by Soviet national Alexey Pajitnov in 1986. The game soared to global fame three years later when it was released with Nintendo's popular handheld video game player, the Game Boy. Tetris is now available for nearly every video game console and computer operating system and for a number of other electronics, including graphing calculators, mobile phones, portable media players, and PDAs. It has even been played on the sides of various buildings with the record holder for the world's largest fully functional game of Tetris being an effort by Dutch students in 1995 that lit up all 15 floors of the Electrical Engineering department at Delft University of Technology.

The objective of Tetris is to arrange puzzle pieces--called tetrominoes--as they fall into a silo so that they will not leave any trapped empty space. When a solid row is filled from one side of the silo to the other, the row disappears and the whole pile drops down one notch. If the pieces are not fit together, the pile continues to climb toward the ceiling, and upon reaching it, the game is over.