Tetris celebrates 25th birthday this week

London, June 2 (ANI): Tetris, the much-loved computer block game, is celebrating its 25th anniversary this week.

A Russian programmer named Alexey Pajitnov created the game that requires players to rotate a series of falling block shapes to make them interlock at the bottom of the screen. The game's maker was 29 at the time.

And now at 44, Pajitnov says that he knew he had devised a hit game when he could not stop playing it.

To date, the game has sold over 70 million copies around the world, and is still going strong.

It is available on almost every gaming platform, including Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Apple IIgs, Atari ST, Commodore 64, NES, WonderSwan Color, and the ZX Spectrum.

It was launched commercially on Nintendo's Game Boy handheld console, with which it was given away free.

Speaking in an interview with the Guardian newspaper, Pajitnov described how he came up with the idea to distract him from his less light-hearted work on a large Soviet-built Elektronika 60 computer.

"I started to put together all kinds of mathematical puzzles and diversions that I had loved all my life," the Telegraph quoted him as saying.

He added: "The program wasn't complicated. There was no scoring, no levels. But I started playing and I couldn't stop. I think that most of the classic games written in the 80s or early 90s are dead just because their authors or owners didn't care about them." (ANI)