tetris-60

About

Tetris is a puzzle game created by Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov in the mid-1980s, in which falling four-block tetrominoes are arranged to clear horizontal lines before they stack to the top. tetris-60 is an Emacs package that recreates the original 1984 Tetris as it ran on the Soviet Electronika 60 terminal, using a phosphor-green ASCII aesthetic with a 10x20 grid, the original tetromino set and scoring, and a dotted playfield. It stores high scores locally in a TSV file and lets colors, fonts, and grid style be customized.

Getting started

It can be installed via MELPA (once accepted) with package-install, or manually by downloading the file and adding it to Emacs's load path, then started by running `M-x tetris-60`; movement uses either the arrow keys or vi-style j/l/i/k bindings.

History

Tetris was created in 1984 on the Soviet Electronika 60 terminal computer, a machine with no graphics card that could only display text — the setting this package's aesthetic and name both reference, also depicted in the 2023 "Tetris" film.

Additional notes

Trivia

The name "Tetris" is a portmanteau Pajitnov coined by combining the Greek "tetra" (four) with "tennis," his favorite sport.