The Famous Game ---Tetris From Russia

by Deng Qilin
(Chofu, Tokyo)

There are a few games that will be named plus some prefix such as the name of a country, but the game named Tetris is an exception!------In Chinese, it is called the Russian Box（俄罗斯方块). At the first sight of the name of the game, someone may think, hmmm, it must have some relation with Russia or Russian people.

I guess so many youths have already played this game and it is so popular nowadays that Facebook has an improved version called Tetris Battle（Figure 3 above） which allows you to play on the Internet. This game is such a game to make the most combinations of the four basic shapes to occupy the limited spaces. When I was a child, we always played Tetris on Tetris Handheld Game Consoles (Figure 4 above), which is now just a memory of our childhood.

And why the game Tetris is called Russian Box has an interesting meaning. It was originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov in the Soviet Union. He derived its name--Tetris--from the Greek numerical prefix tetra (all of the game's pieces contain four segments) and tennis which is Pajitnov's favorite sport.

Now, after I read some articles written by my classmates or from the website, the next time when Russia is referred to, a vivid picture of Russia will appear in my brain ------ a hot Barbie woman doing acrobatics on stage while Putin is sitting in the auditorium holding an AK-47 with a child sitting beside him playing Tetris with an outside temperature of -71℃!