Five Fun Facts: Tetris Edition!
We are SO hyped to introduce everyone to our incredible new pin collection featuring four incredible Tetris Augmented Reality pins! All four pins are beautiful: two showcasing a bit more of the retro vibe with the throwback logos, and two that showcase some pops of color, and all four will look great as a part of any Tetris fan's collection!
For this week's blog, we're looking at all things TETRIS and giving you our Five Fun Facts all about everyone's favorite chaotic tile-matching puzzler!
Outlined in his graphic novel "Tetris: The Games People Play", author Box Brown discussed a very peculiar and specific impact that extended Tetris play could cause. Dubbing it the "Tetris Effect", people that played Tetris long enough could close their eyes and see Tetris pieces falling - and they were even showing up in people's dreams! It became so prevalent that it would later become called a "gaming-induced pseudo-hallucination", and would end up being published in the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction"!
In 2014, Drexel University's gaming department used LED lights that covered the north and south sides of a large building during Philly Tech Week, which broke a previously held record for the largest game of working Tetris, which took place back in 1995 by Dutch students who lit up the Electrical Engineering Department on the Delft University of Technology's campus. (P.S. how cool is it that Drexel has a GAMING DEPARTMENT?! I picked the wrong major...)
What is now one of the most iconic and recognizable pieces of music in history, the Tetris theme was originally a 19th century Russian folk song called "Korobeiniki", which was actually a love song! You see, when Tetris was originally developed, it was essentially a simple game created for the amusement of a Soviet programmer and software designer back in the 80s, and initially had very little iconography or sound that had anything to do with the USSR, Moscow, etc. It was only after the game was sent out West that developers included the "Russian" aspects we know today - the images, the colors, and even the Russian folk song as the theme!
In 1993 Tetris became the very first video game in space when Russian Cosmonaut Aleksandr Serebrov took Tetris and his Gameboy with him during a mission to the Space Station Mir. That Gameboy spent 196 days in space and ended up orbiting the Earth over 3,000 times! I wonder what level he got to - and I hope he stocked up on a lot of batteries!
A study published in 2009 states that consistently playing Tetris can thicken the brain's cortex, which can contribute to improved cognitive effectiveness. They determined the positive effects on your brain during a test of 26 teenage girls who were asked to play Tetris for 30 minutes every day over the course of three months. Following this period of time, those girls took MRIs to determine that they had, in fact, experienced brain thickening and growth. I guess I can tell my mom all that gaming actually CAN make you smarter. Take that, mom!
And there you have it! Five Fun Facts for one of the most iconic names in entertainment and gaming, Tetris! And if you want to score one of our four amazing Tetris AR pins, check them out today at pins.ar/tetris!
