Tetris

Tetris is one of the few games that needs no explanation at all. Seven possible shapes made of four squares fall from above, the player rotates and shifts them sideways, and tries to stack them so that they form complete rows. Every filled row disappears, the rest shift down, and another piece is already on its way. The game has no ending, only increasing speed and an inevitable loss, which makes it a pure contest against one's own attention. Its apparent simplicity hides surprising depth: an experienced player deliberately leaves a column open for the long bar piece, plans ahead using the preview of the next piece, and calculates how many mistakes they can still afford before the stack reaches the ceiling.

On PC, the game arrived in a version published under the Spectrum HoloByte label, and it was a title that could be run on literally anything. Its modest requirements meant it ran on both CGA and EGA cards found in ordinary office machines, which earned it a reputation as the most widely spread game in the world. Sound was initially handled only by the internal PC speaker; sound card support came later, bringing with it arrangements of Russian folk melodies that became forever linked to the game. The visual framing, drawing on motifs of Soviet architecture and folklore, was unusual for the Western market of the time and gave the game an exotic flavor that feels almost touching today.

The original idea came from Alexey Pajitnov, who wrote the game in Moscow in the mid-1980s, and the disputes over its licensing rights are among the most famous stories in the games industry. Its influence on the genre is immeasurable: practically every game where something is stacked, arranged, or vanishes once a complete group forms stands on its foundations. Today there are hundreds of variants with richer graphics and competitive modes, but the DOS version still has its own charm. It's a game you can start for five minutes and walk away from an hour later, and its ability to pull players in hasn't dulled in the slightest over the decades.