The seven shapes that built a generation of thumbs
Forty years after a Moscow research-centre prototype, the cyan I-piece still does the work no other game piece can. A short history of a game written in seven colors.
The first time I lined up four cells into a column, I was nine years old, sitting on a brown carpet, holding a grey plastic brick that drained a 9-volt battery in under six hours. The brick said nothing about Moscow or about a programmer named Alexey. It only knew how to fall.
A grid is a sentence
What Pajitnov did at the Computing Centre in June 1984 was small in scope and absolute in effect — he made a well, he made seven shapes, and he made them fall at exactly the speed of a held breath. The well becomes a sentence; the cyan bar is the punctuation that ends it. Every release since has tried to add adjectives. None of them stuck.