When it began nearly 30 years ago, Tetris quickly became one of the most popular videogames sold.
Now, the Tetris Company, which owns the Tetris brand, says it plans to expand beyond videogames and soon hopes to introduce dozens of new Tetris-themed products. These will include Tetris branded T-shirts, Halloween costumes, tabletop games, chocolates, candy, waffles, furniture that nests together, and even Tetris soup.
The company also plans to introduce a new version of the game in 3D for the Nintendo 3DS at the E3 gaming conference in Los Angeles this week.
The plans for the expanded products and the 3D version of the game were announced in a news release in which the company also said the game broke a new record after people paid for and downloaded Tetris 132 million times on mobile devices. ?No title has been able to sell more paid downloads on mobile than Tetris,? the company claimed.
Lisa Linnenkohl, the head of licensing for Tetris, said in a phone interview that the company releases ?Tetris on every platform that is out there? including the Apple iPhone and iPad, and Android mobile phones and tablets.
Linnenkohl said the price of Tetris varies on each platform, with downloads costing between $1 and $13 each.
In the past Tetris has found fans among doctors and scientists as well as gamers.
In 1991, Richard Haier, a neuroscientist from the University of California at Irvine, began using the game to determine how the human brain works, testing people as they learned how to play over several weeks and seeing the first signs of elascitiy in the brain. In 2009, British scientists discovered that playing Tetris could help people with post-traumatic stress disorder quell their fears.
Brain scans of Tetris players show the game trains people to use their brains more efficiently, in some cases increasing performance seven-fold from the same level of energy.
LinkedIn has launched a new app that lets users play Tetris with pictures of people in their network.
Called DropIn, the game mimics Tetris, but uses head shots instead of blocks. Writing in LinkedIn?s blog, Matthew Shoup, the site?s technical marketing manager, said he created the app to celebrate Tetris? 27th birthday, which was on Monday.
The app also integrates your contacts? latest updates. ?DropIn takes the classic Tetris experience to a professional level,? Shoup writes. ?Rotate and stack your LinkedIn connections? faces, while discovering the fresh content they?re sharing online. There?s never been a more relevant and productive time to play games at work.?
Despite Nintendo acquiring the exclusive console rights to the game, Sega briefly released a version on the Mega Drive. It was quickly withdrawn after legal pressures and the few copies in existence are now valued in the thousands of dollars. The name of Tetris comes from a combination of tetromino (any shape consisting of four squares joined together by their edges) and tennis.