>Ug. Not to be a dick, but the Atari Tetris is the first, and I don't know
>if it was written by the Russian guy directly or just ported, but I'd say
>the guy who came up with Tetris knows what the best game mechanics for the
>game should be, don't you? If you base your game solely on ports of the
>original, then you are that far removed from the original, and that's a
>shame. Also remember that some care should be taken with the algorithm
Thank you for your comprehensive explanation, but I think you are a little bit
wrong here. The Atari version might have been the first one, that was publicly
available in the US, but the first version was created years before that. It was
done in 1985 by Alexej Pajitnow on an russian Elektronika 60. I have never seen
this version, but in the same year he did a PC port with some major help from
one of his students. My version is based on this PC port. All pieces appear
perfectly ramdomly and it didn't even have a fast-fall mode. Dropped pieces
just appeared on the last possible line. There were no level goals. It just
got faster till you died.
Also the Spectrum Holobyte/Mirrorsoft version was released before the Atari
Arcade version, atleast here in Germany.
Nevertheless, the level system seems to be real fun and a better choice for
an arcade game. But to be honest, one of the reasons to do Tetris as my first
project was that I didn't want do do level design. Designing levels that are
challenging, fair and interesting at the same time is a very long process
and I wanted fast results.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
2stolber@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
