In June 1984, Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris on an Elektronika 60 while working for the Soviet Academy of Sciences at their Computer Center in Moscow with Dmitry Pavlovsky. Dmitry approached Vadim Gerasimov to create a DOS port, which he created in Turbo Pascal. The game spread like wildfire, and is now the best-selling game of all time. It is frequently listed as the best game of all time. In Tetris, there are seven sets of pieces, called tetrominoes because they are made of four blocks. They fall from the top of the screen and need to be stacked so that entire rows are filled with no gaps between them, at which point the complete rows disappear and the pieces above them drop by the same number of rows. When the board is filled, the game is over. The controls in the DOS version are a bit difficult at first, but the game is perfectly playable if you use the spacebar instead of "4" to drop pieces. Because the Soviet Union was a Communist nation, it is difficult to say whether or not the original DOS version of Tetris was ever distributed under any license other than freeware. Vadim Gerasimov has made the final version of his original DOS port, v3.12, available on his website as a free download.

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Tetris v3.12 Freeware (14,053 bytes)

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DOS

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Availability

Vadim Gerasimov has generously made this game available for download.