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Tetris is 25 years old today. It's true, Tetris has really hung on. Nobody plays Donkey Kong anymore. Minesweeper? Pfft. Only if you're stuck at work on a really shitty computer. Really old games sometimes enjoy a brief nostalgia fling, but Tetris has always been there, never flagging in popularity. I think it's the simplicity of the game that does it. As the article above points out, it has no characters and no shooting. It's the archetype of what I call geometric games, that have to do with moving inanimate bodies through space to fit together or combine. Until the dash games came along, this is the class of game I always favored, because the geometrics tend to free my mind; I don't have to think about them in the same way as other games, so they're more meditative for me.
Anyway, check out the article. It talks about the history of the game and the guy who designed it back in 1984. Did you know the game was created in Russia?