Happy Birthday, Tetris! Tracing the Game’s History within a Genealogy of Ludic Practices

40 years ago, a game that heralded the birth of in-home and mobile leisure electronics was made: Tetris (1984). When it was first developed by Alexey Pajitnov, the idea of videogames and leisure electronics was barely known, particularly in the Soviet Union (Švelch 2013, 2018; Wasiak 2016). The fact that Tetris still enjoys a large player-base and continues to be reissued on new platforms suggests that it allows researchers to map out the development of games and gaming over four decades. Following on from Lowood and Guins’ reflection that games history is often “consumed with the ‘when’ and ‘what’ to the detriment of the ‘why’ and ‘how’” (Lowood and Guins 2016, xiii), this paper focuses on the latter two questions and expands them with ‘where’ (Swalwell 2021, 1) to move towards a genealogy of ludic practices that acknowledges the impact of socio-historical contexts in the writing of games history (Kerr 2006; Huntemann and Aslinger 2013; Wolf 2015; Kirkpatrick 2017).

Using Tetris as a case study, this paper traces the socio-political and cultural habitus of videogames as leisure electronics (Wade 2018) to suggest a genealogy of ludic practices that does justice to the medium’s origins and diverse developments. In the first part, the production context of Tetris is explored to determine the move from research-based to leisure computing in the geopolitical East and the West in the 1980s and early 1990s (Alberts and Oldenziel 2014, 4; Webber 2020; Garda 2021, 109–168; Seiwald 2020, 2021; Seiwald and Wade 2023; Krobová, Janik, and Švelch 2023). The connection between digital games and electromechanical/analogue games will be addressed because Tetris builds on known structures of puzzle games, evidencing the entanglement of older ludic forms into the digital (Adams 2010, 260). Next, the role of home computing and portable devices, notably the GameBoy, which had a significant impact on Tetris’s success as it made the thrill of the arcade independent of place and time, in the acceleration of gaming as a commodity in the West will be addressed. The development of electronic entertainment and the change of industry needs in the 20th century are thereby juxtaposed to determine the causality between increasing player numbers and (semi-)automation of production sectors (Sotamaa and Švelch 2021). The final part of this paper is dedicated to Tetris’s legacy in the present-day, ranging from its impact on the perception of gaming in society (as pastime, educational tool, political instrument, etc.), its status as a role model for today’s puzzle games, and what it suggests about a genealogy of ludic forms that try to make a distinction between analogue and digital. As videogames employ “existential mechanisms analogues to those by which we engage with the actual world” (Gualeni and Vella 2022, 176), the transpolitics of Tetris is hereby emphasised, positioning it as a product of collective history.

The outcome of this paper is a study of the development of leisure electronics and their legacy for today’s players and game makers that takes localisation into consideration but does not build its approach to games history on the local for its own sake (Izushi and Aoyama 2006). It does so by emphasising the relationship and differences between videogame history in the Western and the Eastern hemisphere by looking at a game that plays an immense part in the history of both geopolitical areas.