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Tetris (1984) — Forty Years of Seven Pieces from a Moscow Computing Center
In June 1984, at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre in Moscow, Alexey Pajitnov wrote a spare-time program that reduced pentominoes to just seven four-square shapes. This piece traces how that minimal ruleset, copied freely across Moscow on floppy disks, became a global commodity through a licensing war between Western publishers and the Soviet trade body Elorg, Henk Rogers's 1989 Game Boy negotiation, and its modern lineage down to Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Tetris Effect (Steam release 2021).
Inside Alexey Pajitnov's Philosophy — Building Order in a Game That Never Ends
A study of Alexey Pajitnov, creator of Tetris, drawn across his own interviews: his philosophy that games are a psychological product, his obsessions with the learning curve and randomness, his openly admitted decade-long failure to crack multiplayer, the dilemmas of intensity and endlessness, and the pentomino influence. Read as a designer who guarded the core and let the surface go.
Puyo Puyo (1991) -- Inventing a New Verb Called "Chain"
Released simultaneously on MSX2 and the Family Computer Disk System on October 25, 1991, Puyo Puyo was conceived by Kazunari Yonemitsu and developed by Compile. Its 1992 arcade collaboration with Sega gave rise to a new verb: the chain (rensa). Even after Compile's collapse in 2003, this design survived -- through 2014's Puyo Puyo Tetris and its 2018 Steam release. I want to reread this one title as the starting point of competitive versus-puzzle design.
